#going insane in the middle of computer structure class

[nelkey]

I need to bite Kim Dokja like a toy and shake him around

[carbon--14]

i have been stalking looking at your blog and not to be weird but i love you (in a mutuals way not a stalker way) also please tell me more abt your rocket scientist life i’m very intrigued if you’re interested in sharing.

hi nonnie why don't you come off anon and say hello properly ;))) jk. are we mutuals? or do i owe u a follow O___O

seriously though it's not even 1 pm and today has legitimately been one of the worst days of my life (family stuff, don't ask) so this was super needed and appreciated. thx for the little giggle lolz

anyway yeah aerospace/astronautical engineering is kind of a weird place to be :P it's kinda niche and the workload is insane, so people burn out quick and the ones who stick around actually enjoy it a little too much tbch. the vibes are a little weird because half of my classmates are like me and there because it's a long time special interest they're willing to commit several years to and the others are obsessed with military tech and really want to be a part of that development. and they're pleasant people to be around, like they're polite and stuff, but i have actually had a conversation with a classmate who told me (and i'm quoting here) "well, i'm not the one pulling the trigger, so i'm not responsible for anything." and his ideal career paths were working on stealth bombers or hypersonics :///// yikes. there's a reason we're not taught ethics especially since military contractors are the primary ones snapping us up for jobs right out of school. ironically though the actual rotc kids are the nicest of that bunch and tend to be super collaborative and friendly? but i'm not joking in one of my first year classes we took a poll of the group's favorite movies and i shit you not over 50% of the class said one of the two top gun movies and another 15% said interstellar X__X (mine is scott pilgrim btw cuz i have taste)

luckily the yippee creatures of the class are very aware of how fucked up the industry is and willing to talk about it so there's still hope. my personal strat is to make myself a very competitive candidate for a very niche subset of the industry without very many "defense" applications lol. :D especially since a lot of those "defense" jobs are in the middle of nowhere in like, texas and alabama and florida. so not exactly the greatest places for me to be. i'm super interested in ion thruster design and development and there's a couple of startups on the west coast that are working on that so i'm crossing my fingers. tbch i am so fed up with the actual industry that i'm genuinely considering going all-in on my online "content creator™" presence just to have some shot at avoiding it. i have been having an actual existential crisis for about 3 weeks wondering if i actually made the right choices in life

but yeah the actual workload will crush your will to live unless you actually enjoy it. my classes this semester consist of incompressible fluid dynamics, dynamics control systems, structural mechanics, numerical methods, and astronomical computer simulation development >_< i'm gonna dieeeee!! and probably need an insane glasses prescription by the end of the year with the amount of coding work i have to do. plus i'm trying to score a research position and finishing up a senior-level independent study lol AND this semester i'll be driving back and forth between school and home (which is three hours each way eugh) to go to concerts and shit with my dad, but hey free tix are free tix. so in case you were wondering why i barely draw anymore, this is my life now X__X alsoalso my faculty advisor for the independent study is nonbinary and giving me job advice! they're super cool i love them foreverrrr

as for my actual hands on experience i'll admit it's limited :PP mostly because it's super hard to score industry experience before the summer before junior year and i was in recovery the whole summer so i literally couldn't hold myself upright for more than a few minutes. but i've done a bunch of projects for classes + uni-funded ones too!! my biggest claim to fame (lol) is working on a three-stage rocket designed to fly to the karman line (which is the Super Official Divide Between The Atmosphere And Space™ lol). everything except our motor was built in-house and i worked on structural design and analysis, so my job consisted of

a) working on and approving cad models of each component before we sent them to the fabrication team,

b) stress-testing all parts the fab team sent us to ensure they were flight ready (there is a picture of me somewhere sitting on a chair precariously balanced on top of three sandbags on top of a giant tube filled with more sand and our nosecone, because sand under enough pressure puts a similar kind of stress on a nosecone as it experiences in flight),

c) fixing any uneven surfaces or manufacturing errors on our parts, and

d) doing so. much. documentation. i have to be totally honest, like 75% of aero/astro e is writing the most boring papers you will ever read in your life :[

and i also built a 3d cad model of the opportunity mars rover from scratch with only official promo pics and rover "selfies" and that thing crashed the lab computers twice and took a week's worth of 8 hour days in the lab + 3 all-nighters. fml but she was so worth it thooooo

sorrysorrysorry nonnie that was probably 10x more info than you were expecting but tl;dr i'm the world's biggest weirdo who actually loves physics and rocketry so i enjoy everything i'm doing in class but the actual job search is hell on earth and i dread the day i graduate :/ for now it's still mostly fun

[irkenheretic]

okay i promised id do it and im doing it: Explaining The Plot Of That AU I’m Vague About: The Post

(as i was preparing to write this i actually got my 250th follower, which slapped)

so i’m just gonna start with the simple version, which is this: it’s a rebel AU which primarily centers around the tallest, who are both defective. they give up on trying to make any meaningful changes as figureheads, and instead direct their attention to being involved with the “neo defect revolution,” or NDR. they do manage to make one change as tallest- there is a garbage dump planet turned into a sanctuary for defectives (who in this au are executed once discovered,) and eventually enough of the populace finds out about it that the tallest have to deal with it. they finesse their way into kicking it out of the empire, so now it’s its own planet with its own rules, governments, and most importantly, immigration policies and protections

a lot of stuff happens and it’s gonna be structured using arcs, and each arc has a separate protagonist/deuteragonist/tritagonist lineup (but that doesnt mean the same lineup won’t be used multiple times!) and yes the insane list of OCs are for this au alone: some arcs are very OC-centric, some have OCs as supporting characters, and a couple are all-OC or mostly-OC. 

its going to be very longform and it’ll span from the tallest’s elite training days to twenty years after zim arrives on earth. (the 20 year gap btwn zim arriving on earth and the story proper isnt as tightly plotted as later tho.) the point is to see how a revolution on the scale of the NDR works, who was fucked over by defact laws, who was fucked over by other laws, etc. theres a lot of lore and a lot of headcanons i made for this AU and even a conlang. i am a being of hubris. itll be a series of fics, some multichapter and some oneshots. 

the series as a whole is gonna be called Invader Zim: Annexed or just Annexed for short. its a pun on an irken word that sounds similar but means the exact opposite. i am not explaining more bc itll be explained in the fic itself. but thats why the tag for it is #anx lmao

i didnt mean for this to be as long as it got but under the cut im gonna breakdown some of the early arcs:

so it all starts with a fanfic called Love Is The H-Word (no the “h-word” isn’t “hell.) it centers around red and purple as elites-in-training, who do a little whoopsie and have an egg. purple doesnt wanna smuggle it into a smeetery, bc then he’ll never see it again, so they go to the defect sanctuary (still a part of the empire at this point.) purple knows he’s defective while red has a hard time accepting that he is as well, due to events from his past. but being around all these other defects are starting to wear down his denial, and the fic is all about that. it also sets up some plot stuff, like how defects adopted a self-identifier in the word “heretic,” hence the sanctuary being named, “heretirk.” (hey look my url!) (no, the “h-word” is not heretic, either.) 

i dont wanna say what happens in that fic bc spoilers, but stuff Happens. its also when we meet some ocs that end up being important, and the existence of others are foreshadowed. this is also where we meet the tallests’ future advisor, rarl kove, for the first time, as a local who decides to keep them company. purple bonds with kove due to their shared interest in politics, while red reluctantly bonds with titch, a young irken (a smeet in heretirken standards, an adult in imperial standards- did i mention he and red are roughly the same age? lol) who is interested in military stuff and thrill-seeking and general destruction. titch is pissed because he claims his father is stealthing on devastis as a military commander, but won’t let titch sneak in as a soldier, as titch is deaf. 

(fun facts: in the au, “titch” is regional slang for “a little bit.” ironically, titch the character is above-average in height.)

due to titch’s deafness, he developed “gesturespeak,” irken sign language, so he can communicate. this existing becomes important later

a oneshot called invade the system is right after h-word in publishing order. it details zim’s exploits in leaving foodcourtia, where he was assigned and infiltrating the invading academy he eventually graduates from (in this au, zim is too short to be an invader, which sucks because the hight minimums for the military are really short to begin with lmao)

the fic chronoligically after H-Word focuses on red and purple being back in their platoon on devastis, specifically red navigating his training and his relationships with two defective platoonmates, pon and zi (who are in h-word a little,) after the realization that he too is defective. it also focuses on how the irken military works, and how they train their soldiers. 

the first arc overall focuses on red and purple going thru training and such, and ends after they graduate and are on the field, working to get commander rank. (they planned to gain commander rank then leave and go back to heretirk to train an army there, as heretirk has.... no army.) in the middle of this, they’re pulled out and told they are to become the next tallest. they debate over staying and taking the job or just running to heretirk, and they ultimately decide to stay.

the next arc i call the “bridge,” tbh. its less tightly plotted than the other arcs; fics are spread apart from each other chronologically and all that. it spans the time after the tallest being appointed to a little after zim arrives on earth. it also has a couple of anthologies focusing on imperial defects- each chapter is a new character. these guys are all important and the easiest way for me to introduce their backstories without cluttering everything up is anthology style, lmao. other things that happen are a look into how the tallest work, eventually culminating with the resolution of the tallest having to Deal With Heretirk, tenn’s rescue from meekrob, and zim on earth obtaining a half-irken smeet named pip due to stealing an Unethical Science Experiment from dib (which is pip.) the bridge is basically just. “heres some stuff that happens between point A and point B so when we get to point B you’re not confused as all hell.” 

the next arc focuses on zim. in the first fic, pip is sick and zim is trying to get into his neighbor’s pants, to cope. this basically sets up that zim in this au has no idea how to find personal fulfillment in living- he’s only OK if he focuses on pleasing someone else, be it taking care of pip or doting on the neighbor, some rando human named piqu (pronounced, “peek.”) this is mainly a cute romance story with the underlying veneer of “a child is slowly and painfully dying” in the background. fun! 

without spoiling the circumstances, zim and pip end up on heretirk, which at this point is its own independent planet. pip is in the hospital for most of it so zim has to do his own thing. computer fans rejoice bc hes basically zims dad at this point, who tells him to go outside and get some fresh air and talk to the locals instead of schmooping or screaming in anxiety. im sneakily introducing more characters like ini, the “next-gen zim;” a short bio-engineer (she works on PAKs) who was constantly passed over by everyone because they dont trust someone that short or they dont trust someone that spazzy, even though shes actually brilliant. also her brother mo, who’s a pilot that NOBODY will teach military-class ships to (at this point, HTK has a population of ex-military that had their old ships, but still no formal army) because he doesnt talk and they think hes “slow” as a result. for the curious, he is physically able to talk most times, he just doesnt like it. zim ends up teaching him how to fly military-class which ends up being important laterrr

(haha ini and mo. wheres meenie and minie? ILL GET TO THEM)

no really, theyre quadruplets. named ini, myni, minie, and mo. these are real characters. 

minie isnt introduced till later. shes too cool to be the side character in someone elses arc. she is feel uncomfortable when we are not about her.

myni is busy palling around with pip and pip’s friend “elly” (real name elevenn, with two N’s.) elly is a half-meekrob War Crime Baby and tenn’s smeet. he has vision problems (he can “see” energy signatures of things, as opposed to conventional sight. everything is monochrome and he has to really focus to see like, words on a paper. also fuck tablets) but the trade-up is telekinetic powers (that he cant use too much or his brain will melt. fun!) this isnt relevant until the arc AFTER zim’s, where they end up poking around a historical site due to myni’s interest in that kind of thing, and they find logs of an old revolution (that was actually pretty successful in their goal, before they were caught and executed,) that lead them to a man named lefy. he helps with revolutions and helped these guys, and the trio go to seek him out; myni because he wants to impress his parents with helping them, pip because after they’ve recovered enough to walk around and do stuff, feel like they need to justify the choice to save their life and make their dad proud and all that, elly because he doesnt want pip to get hurt and die. And thats where the stuff REALLY starts happening and i cant tell u more sorry

this seemed kind of disjointed but thats bc i cant really be too detailed otherwise id like.... spoil it lmfao. but thats the summary of the first few arcs.

[unibrowzz]

My 2020 reviews

All the cool kids were doing these so now I finally dragged my ass into doing them too lmao. 

Albania- Fall from the Sky

A song I swear cursed this whole contest from the moment it won Festivali i Këngës. Like with the shitshow this song caused I just knew the whole year was fucked. With half the fandom whining they didn’t get their first club song of the year to the other half smugly shoving it as their winner despite no other songs being around to compare it to, the whole fiasco just left me knowing that 2020 would end in tears, just hopefully not my own. As for the song, it’s lame. It’s a standard ballad with OBSCENE amounts of autotune, which is weird because the girl can actually sing pretty decently without it, so why they decided to make her sound like a damn computer is beyond me. And WHY did they translate it, haven't the past few years proven that Albania's better off leaving their songs in Albanian? 

Armenia- Chains on You

A bootleg Ariana Grande song, and a really shit one at that. The kind of song only people who think being young, gay and mean counts as having a personality would say is good.

Australia- Don’t Break Me

One of the few decent Australian entries (but that REALLY isn’t saying much coming from me, I barely care they’re in the contest by this point) but marred by a horribly untidy performance and lacklustre lyrics. At least it’s not fucking pop-opera, that’s all I can say. I’d rather listen to the sound of my face being dragged down the runway at Heathrow airport than be subjected to another Zero Gravity.

Austria- Alive

One of those pseudo-jazz dance songs, á la Olly Murs or Bruno Mars (I swear there’s a song like this in every recent contest). I mean, it’s good, but it’s just kinda meh since I’m kinda getting tired of this genre rearing its fedora-wearing head every time a new lineup rolls in.

Azerbaijan- Cleopatra

One of the “better” trashy entries this year, comprised of about five different musical genres, six ancient cultures being appropriated and absolutely zero class. Probably sounds at least 50% better when you’re absolutely steaming drunk and face down on the floor in the middle of a gay bar.

Belarus- Da Vidna

Somehow, this song sounds both very unique and original yet trite and average at the same time. I couldn’t decide whether listening to it was a new experience or if I’d heard it a million times before.

Belgium- Release Me

A song which just drones on till it ends. I would say it’s ripping off the song that won last year, but it forgot that having a chorus stops your song from being three minutes of snooze.

Bulgaria- Tears Getting Sober

A typical breathy mumble-girl song, AKA a genre I can’t fucking stand. Really don’t see the hype with this one, the melody is pretty but the vocals are out for lunch and it’s otherwise completely and utterly boring.

Croatia- Divlji Vjetre

One of the token big dramatic ballads you listen to once, enjoy, then forget about until Darius in the Discord server plays it one night whilst you’re hitting up the radio bot with requests. You’ll find that “nice, but forgettable” is a common theme for this year.

Cyprus- Running

Ironically Cyprus didn’t send a crappy Fuego knockoff for 2020, and I say ironically because a crappy Fuego knockoff would’ve actually stood out this year, and I say crappy because honestly Fuego wasn’t even all that great to begin with. "Running” itself is just one of those edgy tortured soul pop songs which, let’s be honest, would have been paired with an impressive performance which would’ve overshadowed how bland it is. Kind of like “You’re the Only One”. Or even Fuego for that matter.

Czech Republic- Kemama

Standard Afro-pop, a genre we don't often see at the contest so I'll let it pass. I feel like this is the kind of song that’s infinitely better live, and that it would’ve been one of those songs that suddenly became a frontrunner after the semi finals, but I guess we’ll never know eh?

Denmark- Yes 

The quintessential mid-10s Eurovision song. It's got guitars, happy people, Scandinavian origins… it’s just a typical radio guitar song, nothing special.

Estonia- What Love Is

I mean it's better than La Forza. Granted, the sound of someone pissing directly onto a microphone installed in the bowl of a toilet would sound better than La Forza but still. Going back to this song, it’s just... a standard Eastern-ballad with some very desperate lyrics. It feels kind of outdated, if I’m honest. Like something about this just reeks of 2011.

Finland- Looking Back

Yet another dreary, forgettable ballad. It comes to something when the best song they COULD have sent was a party song which sounded like it was from the mid 90s. At least that song was memorable. That said, this one at least has some decent lyrics. Bravo for that I guess.

France- Mon Alliée

France decides to say “fuck it” to being an underground fan-favourite and takes a leaf out of the UKs book by sending the same rent-a-Swede schlock they’ve been sending since 2015. I’m just confused as to why anyone in their right mind would choose to follow the UKs example but you do you France.

Germany- Violent Thing

A rehash of Sweden's entry from two years ago, but this time sung by Justin Bieber circa 2008. Kind of alright if you can stomach the singer's whiny voice, but otherwise pretty dull and kinda forgettable.

Greece- Superg!rl

Hello fellow kidz, we are hearing you like the girl power? The super heroes? The t3xt $p3ech? We made you song, please give us the votes *dabs*

Georgia- Take me as I Am

I mean… this sure is a choice. This feels like one of those songs that everyone memes on because the lyrics are kinda janky and the singer’s voice (and accent) take a bit of getting used to, but other than that it’s just one of those NQ songs for hipster fans to declare as their unironic winner at a later date. All in all this just feels like the male equivalent of one of those mid-10s fat acceptance women’s songs, only a lot shoutier and this time he has more flaws than not being skinny.

Iceland- Think About Things 

A bootleg George Ezra song, performed by a load of disinterested tumblr users in their pyjamas. Because if there’s one thing that sells me on a song, it’s being given the evils by a bunch of nerds who look like they’ll send me death threats for not agreeing with their Pokémon headcanons. To be fair, the song is kind of groovy since it sounds so 70s, but the performance is very off-putting to people who aren’t in the Eurovision loop. And also people who are, because I sure as Hell don’t see the appeal in this myself and this whole performance just feels like Save Your Kisses for Me without the charm. I feel like this would’ve come second or third, definitely with a lot of televotes but either the jury would’ve dragged it down or it wouldn’t have scored enough televotes to win.

Ireland- Story of my Life

A song that’s at LEAST ten years out of date by this point, think like an early Katy Perry, Jessie J or Avril Lavigne song. I’ll forgive it because even though it sounds like it should’ve been entered in 2013 (at the latest), it at least evokes some nostalgic memories of shitty school discos and holiday parks.

Israel- Feker Libi

The female equivalent of the Czech song. Unsurprisingly, people went wild for it when it was released. I guess only women are allowed to sing Afro-pop at this contest. Like with the Czech song, I’ll forgive it since Afro-pop is a cool genre anyway, and even though this is just another club song I can at least see myself dancing to it.

Italy- Fai Rumore

Well, at least my wish of “Italy sends a typical power ballad devoid of anything the mainstream fandom likes” finally came true. It was pretty refreshing to have a year where people weren’t shoving Italy’s entry up my nose left right and centre. In terms of my actual thoughts I can’t deny that the guy has a tremendous voice, but for some reason the song just doesn’t… click with me. I guess I like my male Italian singers a little more gruff and raspy, if you know what I mean. They gotta sound like they smoke at LEAST five packets of cigarettes a day for me to take notice.

Malta- All of my Love

Listen I am 100% rooting for Destiny Chukunyere to win this contest some day but man was this song a disappointment. It feels so… un-special and generic, like it gets the job done and that’s it. It’s not the stand-up-and-belt-it-out soul anthem I’d hoped for, it’s just… there.

Moldova- Prison

All I remember about this song is that it vaguely reminds me of that one Meccano song about the gypsy who makes a deal with the moon or something. And I’ve TRIED to remember more about what it sounds like, trust me.

Latvia- Still Breathing

The one horrible weird song you get every year which overuses strobe effects to the point it comes with an epilepsy warning. Would be bearable if it wasn't for the singer’s insistence that this is actually some feminist masterpiece when it's really just a self-empowerment club song about the singer fingerbanging herself over the fact she writes music.

Lithuania- On Fire

One of the songs everyone thought was going to win at one point, even though it seems like a surefire non-qualifier to me. It’s one of those weird entries, but not the kind of over the top, batshit insane, you’d-have-to-be-drunk-to-enjoy-it weird, the kind of subdued surreal weird. Like this is weed instead of LSD or cocaine weird. Granted my mom, who I consider to be a "typical" Eurofan, actually really liked this song when she saw it in the recaps, so who knows maybe this would have done well with televoters after all.

Netherlands- Grow

I appreciate this song for how artsy and clever it is with its structure, since it starts off acapella and the instrumental builds up with the song until it stops suddenly, symbolising a person’s growth from a child into an adult, and ending suddenly with their death (Geddit? The song’s called “Grow”). But it feels like the kind of song that would be lost on a Eurovision audience. The juries would have taken note, for sure, but the televote… let’s be honest, they’d have been too busy drunk voting for Russia to care about anything else.

North Macedonia- You

Well, it's better than the miserable dirge they sent last year, but given how I'd rather pleasure myself with a steak knife than listen to that song, that really isn't saying much. Going back to “You”, it really just feels like a diet version of Switzerland’s entry from last year, combined with Sweden’s song from 2018. What I’m saying is it’s your average “I’m a man in a club and I want to dance with and probably fuck this hot girl I just met” song, which I a new genre I just made up. You’re welcome.

Norway- Attention 

One of those songs you appreciate because it sounds nice and the singer has a good voice, but instantly forget because it’s really not all that interesting. If I sound like I'm repeating myself, welcome to Eurovision 2020.

Poland- Empires

“Rise Like a Phoenix” but sung by a wannabe Adele and not a mascara-wearing Jesus in a dress. Like a lot of other songs on this list, it’s just average across the board, likeable when it’s on, but instantly forgettable as soon as the next song comes on.

Portugal: Medo de Sentir

Pretty, but also similar to their ill-fated 2018 entry, only with a bit more energy and less pink hair. What I’m saying is this would have been another NQ unless the crowd who enjoy subtle ambience music come in to save it like they did with Slovenia's entry last year.

Romania- Alcohol You

See Bulgaria, because this is practically the same song. It’s just as dreary, just as badly sung (if not worse because holy shit this girl sounds like she’s being suffocated), and I suppose you COULD excuse that by saying she’s drunk or hungover… but I don’t want to listen to someone ungracefully mumble into a microphone for three minutes.

Russia- Uno

A classic big camp party song, the kind of song people who haven’t watched Eurovision since 2003 think wins on the regular. I can see why people would like it (especially in this boring year lmao, I applaud Russia for taking the opportunity to loosen their corset and just send a complete mess instead of their usual clinical vote grabs), but it’s just not something I enjoy. It's the song that plays into the misconception that Eurovision is just a clown show for drunk people, like this is just here to be that one flash-in-the-pan meme song that only entertains people who don’t really care about Eurovision until the day before it airs. Kind of like the old ladies they sent in 2012 (remember them?).

San Marino- Freaky!

San Marino, in true Sammarinese fashion, have yet again sent a decade-ambiguous song which sounds like it was either released in 1978 or 2003. I feel like this would have been one of those songs which could have surprised us if it had a really wacky, creative performance (think like Moldova in 2018), but this is San Marino so you know that would never happen.

Serbia- Hasta la Vista

Insert unoriginal joke about a decade wanting their shitty trend back right here. Okay maybe that’s a bit harsh, especially considering how this song is actually, yanno, unique in comparison to the rest of this year. But it still feels weirdly dated, in a way where I can’t decide whether it sounds like it belongs in 1998 or 2018. I suppose girl power ages a song regardless of when it was released.

Slovenia- Voda

Yet another standard Balkan-European power ballad which you appreciate because it’s well sung, but forget the moment it ends because it’s kinda boring. … Does anyone else have a bit of deja vu?

Spain- Universo

For some reason I feel like this song is shilling itself out to someone but I have no idea who. Aside from the horny people voting solely because the singer is moderately attractive even with that wretched Jedward haircut.

Sweden- Move

Imagine soul but… boring.

Switzerland- Répondez Moi

Imagine Arcade but… in French.

United Kingdom- My last Breath

Not the best the UK could have done, but it’s at least a modern offering unlike the residual dregs of the mid-90s that we sent throughout the 2010s. It’s definitely a bit too generic to have done any better than maybe 15th, but hey at least the cancellation means we won’t have to see it not do as well as the BBC thinks it’s entitled to do, prompting a billion clickbait articles about how Brexit somehow affected our performance.

Ukraine- Solovey

At long last we come to something you probably weren't expecting: a song I actually really like. Which is weird because I usually don't care for or don't like whatever Ukraine vomits into the contest, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a song I liked from them in such a weak year. This song isn’t for everyone, it’s white noise singing which is a very acquired taste, but this is honestly the only 2020 song I find myself coming back to over and over. And it’s in Ukrainian too, so you don’t have to put up with their usual mangled English offerings.

[prairiedust]

The Folkloristics of Supernatural

So. Something interesting is happening in Season 14. I suspected that it was coming when they revealed in 12 that Jack’s name would be Jack. Jack as in “the Giant Killer” Jack. Jack like “Jack Tales.” Jack from all of the “Jack and the Devil” stories. This Jack. But Dabb is running a long mytharc, so last season was the set-up for this season-- priming the pump, if you will, for what the writers are doing now, and it came to fruition in the first few episodes.

As I said before, we got a hint of this theme in Jack’s name as well as in the way the season wrapped up with grieving Dean and Dead!Cas mirroring the last scene of despairing Cas and Possessed!Dean. Folklore brings with it the other thematic elements we’ve seen so far-- mirrors (oh my god the mirrors,) recursion and repetition, callbacks, sleep, and sleep-like death.

But why folklore *in particular*? And how is “folklore” as a theme in seasons 13 and 14 any different from the fact that this is a show *based* on folk tales?

This season, the writers are not only telling stories drawn from folklore, they are using folklore and folkloristics (the academic discipline) as a theme.

Andrew Dabb wrote a formulaic tale into the premiere, and I flipped my lid. A formula tale is one that relies on a set structure, such as the tale of Henny Penny, The Little Red Hen, or the Fisherman and his Wife, where challenges or episodes are repeated over and over until all the possibilities are exhausted or something breaks the chain. The story of Michael’s quest is a tale that relies on formula as well as on the structure of a “rule of three,” or two challenges that fail and one that succeeds. He asked a human and an angel what they wanted, before finding a monster whose desires he considered purest. Compare that structure to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or The Three Little Pigs. I have a much more in-depth analysis of the “rule of three” that I will post later. This and other “folklore” elements in the next three episodes established this as an official “Thing on the Show.”

For now and for those of you new to the idea of the study of folklore, I’ll summarize the history of the academic discipline of folkloristics.

More than six hundred years ago, in post-Renaissance Europe, concerned scholars and bored aristocrats started doing something strange.

They started collecting folk stories from the lower classes.

This was strange because the disdain that the “upper class” (which included not just nobility and gentry but clergy and those squirrely scholars as well) felt for the emerging middle class and the peasantry can not be overstated. But perhaps because they were fascinated with that which they looked down upon, many learned men and women during the Age of Enlightenment began to study folkways and oral tales.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, “fairy tales,” “wonder tales,” “Märchen,” and “Mother Goose” stories lit up courts (and later salons) all over Europe. People recorded them from a handy peasant, wrote them down with a judicious application of upper-class refinements, and later crafted original stories inspired by them. There are works that were preserved from an oral version, like Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” (which is based on a Neapolitan folk tale but is considered a literary work rather than a transcription and if you read a faithful translation you’d get why that is, he very much polished it with literary allusions and asides) as well as those found in Grimms’ first edition (1812) of collected oral stories which included the bloody version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” then there are folk tales that were cleaned up and sanitized for your comfort, like every Grimm edition since that one, ha ha, and at last there are “literary” fairy tales, or stories that are “original content” but were constructed on a folkish scaffolding like, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose.” Authors still use fairy tales to inform and inspire-- Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling edited several anthologies of contemporary fairy tales or retellings of old tales by modern authors, beginning with Snow White, Rose Red in 1993 and ending in 2000 with Black Heart, Ivory Bones which, if you enjoy trope subversion and walking around for days bearing a lingering sense of disquiet, are seriously worth reading.

While the Grimms’ work in collecting German folk tales is considered the “watershed” moment for European folk studies (the Chinese, in contrast, have been archiving oral poetry and stories for thousands of years and Arab Muslim scholars may have started collecting folk tales as early as the 10th century CE,) it wasn’t until about a hundred years had passed from the Grimms’ first publication that the discipline took a distinctly scientific turn.

In 1910, a Finnish folklorist named Artti Aarne published a work entitled ‘Verzeichnis der Märchentypen,” or “Types of Folktales.” He had analyzed his own extensive collection of Scandinavian folk stories and realized that these tales often shared the same plots and elements—helpful animals, daring rescues, clever wives, and more-- albeit in different configurations. He broke the stories down to their essential components-- decoded their DNA, if you will-- and asserted that these story elements were used like beads on a string to construct a myriad of tales. He called these elements “Motive,” or motifs. In 1960, an American anthropologist named Stith Thompson translated Aarne’s work from the German and expanded upon it to include stories from a broader European sampling as well as Native American traditions. This became known as the Aarne-Thompson Motif Index. It is one cog in a larger academic movement during the 50’s and 60’s wherein researchers of all stripes endeavored to unearth the earliest roots of mankind—from the search for fossils of the earliest hominids, to tracing the very first languages, to reconstituting the ur-myths that shaped human culture. Academics and field researchers were determined to pinpoint the moment in time when we became more than just a bipedal primate (if we ever even have.) The Index revolutionized folkloristics as anthropologists and other scholars realized that they could trace these story motifs through time and across geography the way linguists were already doing with sounds and words to compile Proto-Indo-European, the language of Neolithic humans who settled India and Europe, and how geneticists today can trace human migrations out of Africa by studying human genomes.

The Index is a taxonomic classification system, like meteorology or the Dewey Decimal System. There are twenty-six parent categories, with subcategories and more subcategories. The Motif Index is organized alphabetically from A-Mythological Motifs (like creation myths) to Z-Miscellaneous Motifs (such as “Z210: Brothers as Heroes.”) There is an adjacent Index of Tale Types, as well, which works similarly. In the Tale Types Index, for instance, “Tales of Magic” comprise subcategories 300 to 799; one subcategory in “Tales of Magic” is “Supernatural or Enchanted Relatives,” which covers tale types 400-459. Tale type number AT 410 is “Sleeping Beauty.” The Basile tale “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” “Sleeping Beauty in the Woods” by Charles Perrault, as well as Grimms’ “Little Briar Rose” fall under this category. The two indices operate in tandem-- for instance, the Basile story and the tale collected by the Grimm brothers are the same kind of story, but they have unique motifs. Both Perrault’s princess and the German Briar Rose are the subjects of a dire prophecy-- motif M340-- and fall into a magic sleep, which is motif D1960. Other motifs are not shared among all three stories, like cannibalism. Yeah, that story is buck wild once you go back a few generations.

Anyway, in 2004, the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index was once again revised, this time by German scholar Hans-Jörg Uther, in an attempt to make the index more inclusive of other global folk traditions, and it was renamed the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folktales.

The quest to uncover the proto-stories of our ancestors continues in this very decade in the work of Julien d’Huy, who uses computer modeling to make “phylogenetic maps” of stories from around the globe. He can then create diagrams of a universal story-- for instance the “Cosmic Hunt” (D’Huy 2014).

You can also see the concept of the AT motif index in computer-generated novels and scripts, which are “written” by AIs who have ingested and digested and then assimilated whatever weird-ass shit their creators feed it and from that we get gems like “There is more Italy than necessary” from an AI-scripted Olive-Garden commercial.

The website TV Tropes works very much like the motif index, although in a much less taxonomic fashion—for instance, one trope they describe is “Room Full of Crazy,” a “motif” if you will that tv writers often use as a way of indicating quickly to the audience that a character is off their rocker (or at least obsessive to the point of near-insanity) by showing them writing or drawing something over and over in a notebook, on their bodies, on walls, etc. Supernatural used this recently to let us know how very messed up Gabriel was after his time with Assmodeus in season 13 “Bring ‘Em Back Alive.”

But it is important to remember that Kripke has used this exact trope before, in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” to let us know that Anna was having visions and hearing what would later be known as “Angel Radio.”

To some extent, Room Full of Crazy was also used all the way back in season one in “Dead in the Water” to represent the little boy’s repressed trauma.

The repetition of tropes (or callbacks) that have already been used earlier in the series is another signal that telegraphed this shift into the realm of folk tales and mythology in a thematic sense.

Yes, Supernatural has always been about folk tales and myth. Native American stories like that of the wendigo, urban folklore like the story of the hook man and other perils of “parking,” shtrigas, skinwalkers, etc, have served as both monsters-of-the-week and Big Bads. The premise of the show draws, pishtaco-like, from world stories to survive. But we’re going to dig down and find not just the fairy tales of season 14, but the tale types and the motifs and discover what this kind of focused close-reading can tell us about this season’s values.

Lots of people point out that the Index is dry and strips away so much that you could literally tell a story just by listing the motifs in order (this comment from my folklore prof many, many years ago when we got into the motif index in class.) But that is not at all how the originators intended the index to be used. If anything, as evidenced by the “phenogenetic” tale typing of d’Huy, the presence of a folktale motif is more powerful than any literary allusion or pop-culture reference. If you realize that you’re watching a story that involves a “beat the Devil” premise, and you’ve read some of those tales, they should all light up like a constellation in your memory. You might even mentally replay the electric guitar riff from Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” When we learned that the nephilim was going to be named Jack, and that his mother was hanging all of her hopes on him, you may have subconsciously thought of Jack and the Beanstalk or other Jack tales and made a prediction about the kind of story that we might see Jack feature in*. All the protagonists, all the challenges, all the outcomes of those stories will spread like beacons across a plain-- which is what comparative literature is all about in the first place. It is less about reducing a story to its DNA and more about finding that story’s family tree. And writers like Jane Yolen and the aforementioned Datlow and Windling use these bits of stories to write new ones. Oh and writers like Mr. Andrew Dabb, who used a most familiar formula (to his American audience at least) to start out the season. It’s wild, y’all.

So welcome to the folkloristics of Supernatural. As my favorite professor used to say, are there any thoughts, questions, miscellaneous abuse? My asks are open.

Here’s to a fantastic mideseason.

*allusion is not allegory, meaning you bring in an allusion to another text for depth; if you want to retell the story of Jesus and Christianity you write the Narnia Chronicles. However. Just because Jack was not the one to kill Lucifer does not mean Lucifer’s death was not foretold… the point of retelling these stories in a literary setting is to find the other values that the story can reveal, or to take a trope and twist it to reveal something that had not previously been considered.

Caveat: I’m NOT a prophet. None of us meta writers are. Nothing is stopping anyone involved in the show from making a decision that runs contrary to the story’s architecture, and it’s even been done before. I even have a post about trying to predict from the subtext or even text of a serial publication, like a tv series, that I’ll fit into this series. But anyway, use these posts to “prove” that destiel will be going canon at your own peril. And also I won’t be focusing only on “destiel” subtext. There’s stuff in these episodes for everyone, it’s chock full o’ nuts.

ALSO I have been deliberately staying away from a lot of meta while I compiled this, so if there’s more going on along these lines please feel free to tag me in :)

[shirlleycoyle]

My Life as a Meme: ‘I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This’ Revisited

In November 2007, an entirely contextless video of me being punched in the face went viral. You might have seen it. It still does the rounds every couple of months, often when something notably bad happens that warrants a response of disbelief. In these strange times, it’s managed to remain endlessly prescient.

For the uninitiated, the video in question is an 11-second clip in which, aged 16, I appear wearing a dressing gown cord around my head, a chain necklace, some children’s sunglasses and a black T-shirt. I sit down and address the camera, ostensibly about to tell the viewer what I was thinking. I am immediately interrupted by my friend Tim, who appears stage left and lamps me. Rather than react in pain or anger, I err more towards disappointment and dismay, bewildered that something like this could happen. “Ah fuck. I can’t believe you’ve done this,” I said. End scene.

It’s been nearly 14 years since I uploaded the original video and to this day it still prompts questions. Who was the guy who got punched? Why did he get punched? Who punched him? What was he thinking? Why did he react that way? Why did he leave YouTube?

In recent years I’ve come to appreciate and even enjoy its bizarre status as an enduring piece of internet history, but my relationship with the clip in the decade that followed its inexorable rise hasn’t always been easy. To understand why, it’s useful to remember that the internet in 2007 was, for better or worse, a very different place.

Having spent the best part of my school years filming stupid skits with mates instead of studying, there was something semi-appealing about the prospect of being able to put videos online to share with friends. It began in mid-2003, when myself and a group of friends would have been in our early teens. Inspired by the likes of Jackass and Bam Margera’s CKY movies, our impressionable young selves set about ignoring all relevant safety warnings, hurling ourselves out of trees, riding scooters into curbs, and racing tyres down hills on skateboards.

At the age of 14 or so, I had envisaged cutting the footage into a chaotic feature-length video of “stunts.” I’d probably have soundtracked it with music from the Tony Hawk games, alongside countless other homemade skate videos people made circa 2003 that probably featured a mix of Ace of Spades or Guerilla Radio. I still have a box full of VHS-C tapes kicking around somewhere, which can only be viewed on one of those absolutely insane VHS adapters. Having not watched any of it in well over a decade, I can safely say that the content contained within those tapes is unequivocally shit.

All of a sudden you're everywhere and it's out of your control. You either try to fight it and get destroyed, or embrace it and try to cash in.

Looking back, the whole endeavour was entirely aimless, but aside from coming away with mild head injuries from time to time it was an innocuous way to spend my childhood. At the very least it also means I have a bizarre, tangible record of my youth that I’ll be able to laugh at one day when I’m old and wizened.

By summer 2004, we had started filming on Mini-DV, which opened up a whole new world of editing possibilities. Plugging a video camera into a computer and capturing footage directly to editing software is pretty much a given for today’s generation of content creators, but back in the early 2000s, this was revolutionary.

We’d eventually gravitate away from ‘stunts’ towards more structured skits and sketches. Nothing was ever scripted per se, but we’d usually start out with a rough idea of something and see how it played out.

There was an ambitiously misguided 'silent horror' short, soundtracked by Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, in which someone chopped off ‘my cock’ (a banana) with a garden shear. We considered this to be the absolute pinnacle of comedy.

There was an ill-advised 'Ballers' skit in which we ventured out in sports gear to make a mock training video taking the piss out of a guy at school who fancied himself as a bit of a gangster; this painfully middle-class white kid who listened to rap metal and liked basketball. He obviously never saw it and there's no question that we looked like idiots filming it at the local park. It’s probably quite offensive in hindsight.

The author at the Bristol Climate Change Protests in September 2019. Image: Shanya Buultjens

There was a James Bond 'spoof' that involved misquoting portions of dialogue from that scene in GoldenEye where Q gives Bond an exploding pen. It was funny to about three people. One of them was my mum.

One time a mate of mine fell out of a tree when he tried to swing from a branch. He landed on his back and ended up coughing up blood. He didn’t go to the hospital even though he probably should have. He’s now a doctor and a father.

Mercifully, none of this stuff ever made it online, but I did sell a couple of DVDs to people at school who rightly/probably/hopefully never watched them. In an ideal world, I'd own the only copies. I'm also fully aware that writing about this now only makes it more likely that one of the four people that still have a copy will dig theirs out. Please do not do that.

In 2005 and 2006, YouTube was very much in its infancy. This was the time when clips were limited to about 100mb and you could only upload about 30 seconds worth of footage at a time, which basically made it perfect for bursts of frenetic, inane content. As the platform grew, it became a dumping ground for skits and footage that we’d accumulated over the preceding years. Much of it went completely unnoticed until late 2007, at which point things started to get a bit weird.

The truth is that, nearly a decade and a half later, I’m still processing it.

The clip that people have come to know started out as an aimless skit filmed in Summer 2006. We hadn’t planned anything, least of all me being punched. In the footage building up to the event, I pushed Tim off the chair, he fell and hit his head on a filing cabinet off-camera. Rather than react to Tim, I sat down and proceeded to ad lib something that I’d venture to guess would have been considerably less funny than the act of violence that followed. Unprompted, Tim upsided me and I reacted with an inexplicable, completely incredulous response, which has followed me online ever since.

The footage sat on a tape until July 2007 when I decided to upload a brief segment under an ambiguous title. Fast forward to November and the video had somehow blown up, had its comments section relentlessly spammed, been ripped countless times and had offensive Wiki pages written about it. I also received a few direct messages which could at best have been described as ‘worrying’ and at worst ‘threatening,’ which was nice.

To this day, I’m none the wiser as to how it blew up in the way it did. I originally uploaded the video under the title ‘ ___________’ but the video somehow found its way onto 4chan where it spread like wildfire. The earliest mirrored link I could find was from January 2008, by which time it had been re-uploaded by multiple accounts, the most prominent of which had already clocked up almost double the number of views compared to my original upload.

At the time, going viral wasn't really comparable to any other experience and it certainly wasn't something I could discuss in solidarity with my friends. All of a sudden you're everywhere and it's out of your control. You either try to fight it and get destroyed, or embrace it and try to cash in. After yanking down several other videos on my YouTube channel, I opted for the latter.

When the video blew up, I got a call from a friend who informed me that the video had made the front page of Break.com. I peripherally knew what that meant: they offered a buyout scheme for videos that made the front page, which meant that I could make some money from it.

As it transpired, this wasn’t such a great idea. After signing a release form with some pretty appalling terms, over the following months I had several unnerving interactions with researchers for various TV shows looking to license the clip. Each offered far more favourable terms than those of Break. One of them harassed a bunch of my mates on Facebook. I think he even offered to pay one of them for my contact details.

By that point, it was all too apparent that I had completely fucked it. Break had the rights and I couldn't do anything with it even if I wanted to. At just 18 years old, I had sold out. In the short term, I used the money to buy a TV, which was great, but I soon started to get the creeping feeling that this was a decision that would come to haunt me. At that point, it was easier to disassociate myself from the clip, abandon YouTube, and move on with my life.

And yet, for the best part of 14 years the questions have kept coming: no, it wasn’t staged or scripted, it wasn’t a set-up, I didn’t know it was coming and, yes, it hurt. It was also very funny, which is presumably why I felt the need to upload it in isolation in the first place. Incidentally, Tim and I are still friends and contrary to some of the absolutely insane comments people leave on YouTube I can confirm that neither of us are in prison, the punch wasn’t a reaction to some sort of disagreement and he’s a lovely bloke.

To be clear, the lack of context wasn’t a deliberate choice to add intrigue either. I’d never even considered the possibility that anyone outside my circle of friends would see it. To me it was just another daft clip that a few mates would find funny.

Around the time I’d started to make peace with the issues around ownership, in 2018 it came to my attention that Break had shut down and its owner Defy Media had gone bust. The site was subsequently purchased by Yeah1 Network, but to this day I have no clarity whatsoever on my legal rights to the video. Any attempts to receive guidance have either turned up dead ends, or led to suggestions that I speak to IP lawyers, whom I have neither the means nor the time to deal with. Incidentally, if anyone has any insights in that area, I’d love to hear them.

Having said this, there’s something quite empowering in taking something embarrassing and admitting to it before someone else can point it out to you—a bit like taking ownership of an amusing surname. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what gags can be made from the name ‘Weedon,’ but I learned quite early on that if you make the jokes yourself and beat others to it, no one can fucking touch you. It’s much easier nowadays to hold my hands up and admit that I shouldn’t have sold the rights, make a joke of it and move on. At the very least, it makes for a good anecdote at parties.

As I suspect is probably the case for old content creators, if you can even call us that, the real story about I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This isn’t in how it’s aged and endured, or even how it’s impacted my life. For me, it’s tied up in issues of rights, ownership, and monetisation. As mercenary as it might be, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t regret missing out on a slice of the pie when it came to YouTubers being able to monetise their content sooner. On the one hand, that's probably a very cynical view for something that was created by a bunch of teenagers who were fooling around making videos for fun in the noughties, but on the other, that's just the world we live in now.

Perhaps the strangest thing about my experience with it nowadays is the way people engage with it on a day-to-day basis. The comments vary from young people discovering its origins for the first time, surprised to discover that it is in fact a 14 year old video and not a recent creation filmed for Vine or TikTok. At the other end of the spectrum are those who are incredulous that someone with a video that has 9.2 million views and an account that’s amassed over 15,000 followers without really trying would step away from the platform and not want to make content.

The truth is that, nearly a decade and a half later, I’m still processing it. I love seeing how it’s been re-interpreted in modern mediums and that positive association has made it easier to accept. Charles Cornell turned it into a sad song. It got sampled in a KIll The Noise track. I had a nice interaction with The Sidemen about it. Will Smith even featured it in an insane Instagram post during the pandemic. I DM’d him to say thanks and he obviously didn’t reply.

To that end, a small group of us have recently started work on a film project exploring the nature of the meme, how it grew, its impact on my life and my relationship with the internet at large. In doing so, the hope is that, while answering some of the burning questions that other people still seem to have, I’ll ultimately be able to make peace with the whole thing.

@Twotafkap

My Life as a Meme: ‘I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This’ Revisited syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[aaronbleyaert]

Books, movies and TV reccos, Bley. Its been a while.

Oh boy. 

Books: Welp, on the recommendation of my pal Sam Humphries, I am reading the excellent “Wolf Hall”. Holy shit. I am not one for historical fiction, but Hilary Mantel’s writing is unreal. And the story (about Thomas Cromwell) is pretty engrossing. I know absolutely nothing about Henry VIII or that time period, so it’s pretty awesome.

I’m also in the middle of the short story collection “You Are Not A Stranger Here” by Adam Haslett, which is great. Very dark and sad, but weird and good. His story “The Beginnings of Grief” is haunting. 

Over the past two months I ripped though:

- How Music Works by David Byrne I cannot recommend this book enough. It should be required reading for every person who is, or wants to be, creative. 

- Shop Class as Soulcraft, which argues that working with your hands can have a meditative effect, which I agree with (and is something I’m trying to do more often).

- Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I read years and years ago when I was in middle school and I thought that it was okay - so when I read a piece recently that praised it, I decided to go back and read it again. It’s interesting how all forms of art reflect who we are back at us - I’m a different person than the first time I read it, so it was like reading it all over again for the first time.

- Everybody has a boner for Steinbeck, and I never really understood why. I was supposed to read The Pearl in school, but never did - so I read it in an afternoon. Simple, but great. 

- It takes me forever to read non-fiction, but I thought Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar was pretty good. I only made it about 3/4s of the way through, but I knew zero about Stalin before this book and well… It was pretty nuts. Hard to believe that those things actually happened.

- I’m always interested in things I know nothing about - and design & marketing is one area that’s a blind spot for me. My good friend Tom Crowe recommended Drapin Design co: Pretty Much Everything which is written by the guy who designed a ton of shit for everything and everybody from Patagonia to Marc Maron to Nike to Obama. I love Aaron Drapin’s style, and this book has a lot of really cool ideas in it.

- Again, along the lines of not knowing about things, I bought A Comparative Genealogy of Modern Architecture about a year ago and will come back to it every few months when I’m feeling ambitious to try to learn something. It’s really cool: It takes two similar buildings and puts them side by side, talking about the similarities and differences in structure, purpose, form, aesthetics, etc etc. Really great introduction to the world of architecture for us dummies, and has made me think differently about the places we happen to inhabit every day.

Comics: the newest volume of “East of West” is okay, but that whole series is AWESOME. Probably my favorite comic right now. Weird and epic - an apocalyptic western in an alternate future with Death himself as the hero. Author Jonathan Hickman is The Man. Also digging Shaolin Cowboy, which has some of the most insane shit I’ve seen drawn on a page - and I’m eagerly waiting for my copy of Habibi by Craig Thompson to arrive so that I can unhinge my mind jaw and devour it whole.

Art: Went to a recent opening by Victor Castillo, whose work is stunning and awesome and dark as fuck. Here’s an example:

Also discovered the absolutely incredible work of environmental artist & sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, who I promptly fell in love with. Here’s one of his works, showing just how powerful arranging found leaves can be: 

You think you need a fancy pen or an expensive computer to make something beautiful? No way, jose. Here’s more of his stuff. 

TV: I’ve been watching Vice news every night, which I’m digging. 

Movies: Finally saw “It Comes At Night”, which was cool looking but ultimately disappointing. “The Skin I Live In” and Blade Runner are on the list of things I want to see next.

Music: I’m obsessed with trying to get my own show, and made a list of songs to play as as credits play - so imagine the last scene of an episode; one of the characters says something awkward… Then we immediately smash cut to credits with one of these songs that’s on my credits playlist. 

Furiously finishing up a pilot (based on the short film I made), and listening to a lot of Bonobo in the background while writing to keep those words flowing. Also, juuuuust starting to piece together a new project about a bad ass girl who learns to takes matters into her own hands, and am listening to a lot of The Regrettes as a soundtrack for that (this song in particular).

… And that’s it! That’s all I’ve been consuming lately. What about you guys? I’m always on the hunt for something new. Leave your recs of things you’re super into right now in the comments!

[thepatricktreestump]

Pinky Promise: a Josh Dun fanfic

Y/N: Okay this might not be factually accurate but again, it’s called (fan)fiction for a reason. But I did have a little fun with the formatting and structure of this one so I hope you like it!!! super fluffy stuff!

emute28 said: Could you do Josh x reader when they were friends when they were little kids and Josh had crush on reader.Josh star touring and some how forgot about reader and they met like after 10 years?:) By the way you are amazing writer :)

*gender neutral, warning: fluff overload lol jk

KINDERGARTEN

“Three, two, one. Ready or not, here I come!” Josh’s voice echoed throughout the house. You giggled, trying to stifle your laughter as you crouched down even lower into the laundry basket, the weight of a sweatshirt draped over your head drooping ever so slightly as to block your vision. It was uncomfortable, but by far, probably one of the best hiding places you’ve picked. Spending time with Josh was one of your favorite past times. Every single day after kindergarten, you’d ride home with Josh and his mom and spend time with him coloring with crayons, eating milk and cookies, or in this case, challenging each other at a game of hide and seek. It wasn’t long before he was shouting your name desperately, sure he had lost you for good. “Y/n! I give up! Please come back!”

“Fine!” your small voice shouted out. You poked your head out of the laundry basket just in time to see him race into the room, panting for breath, desperate expression fading away and replaced by a hopeful one.

“Thank goodness!” he sighed, running over to you and picking you up out of the laundry basket, giggling. “I thought I lost you for good, y/n.”

“Nah,” you shook your head with a smile. “I’m just really good at hiding.”

“Don’t be too good,” he pouted, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’d be really lonely without you.”

“I won’t leave you,” you rolled your eyes, picking the sweatshirt up off of your head and tossing it back into the laundry basket. “We’re best friends forever, remember?”

“Pinky promise?” he raised his eyebrows, reaching out his hand and sticking out his pinky.

“Pinky promise,” you grinned, linking his with yours and giving it a good shake. Your kindergarten teacher had taught your class a couple days ago that pinky promises were the most powerful promises there were. Ever since, you and Josh had sealed every deal with a pinky promise. It was like your own little personal handshake.

THIRD GRADE

Everyone was supposed to stay in their seats. Your teacher had specifically told you that you’re not allowed to leave your table. You were all instructed to cut out hearts from the red, pink, and white construction paper, pick up a chocolate and tuck it in between the paper, and write who it was for and who it was from in pretty perfect cursive on the front with a silver marker. So you were probably on your fifth valentine when your best friend Josh came walking over to your table, sitting down beside you with a pink valentine in his lap. “Josh,” you hissed, staring at him. “What are you doing? You’re going to get in trouble! Go back to your seat!”

“I have to give you something,” he mumbled, fidgeting with the piece of paper between his fingers. His brown eyes started up into yours and you forgot about the possibility of getting in trouble for a split second. You looked down at the valentine in his hands and then flickered your eyes back up to his, letting out a soft laugh.

“We’re not allowed to hand them out until tomorrow,” you reminded. “Remember? When Valentine’s Day actually is?”

“I know, I know,” he sighed, running a hand through his hair and looking around nervously. “I just um, it couldn’t wait.”

“Really?” you looked at him, confused.

“I kind of wanted to tell you a while ago,” he shrugged. “I thought maybe right now would be a good time.”

“Okay,” you decided, watching as he handed you the pink heart and you unfolded it carefully. There, written in his usual all capital letters rather than the loopy fancy cursive, was his words. (Dear y/n, I really like you. I was hoping maybe you liked me too? It’s okay if we stay friends though. I just thought you should know. Xoxo, Josh.) Noticing he had picked out your favorite chocolate from the selection and tucked three pieces in between the pink paper, you smiled before looking up at him again, noticing how scared he was. He was fiddling his thumbs, biting his lower lip, eyes darting around the room anxiously.

“So, um, uh…” he stuttered out, not even able to string together a sentence of words.

“Hey,” you put a hand on his shoulder. “I like you too.”

“Really?” he raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” you nodded. “You’re my best friend forever. Remember?”

“Oh,” his face fell. Why did he look so sad? He was your favorite friend. You had just told him this, too. “Yeah. We are.”

“What? Do you think I’m lying?” you tilted your head to the side, frowning. “I really do like you.”

“Pinky promise?” he whispered, eyes still full of uncertainty.

“Pinky promise,” you reassured, hooking his pinky with yours.

“Thank you,” he laughed.

“No problem,” you grinned, leaning over and pressing a soft kiss to his cheek, which surprised him completely. “Now get back to your seat before you get in trouble, silly.”

“Yeah,” he blushed, trying to hide a smile before rushing over back to his seat. Little did you know, it was Josh’s best day of his life yet.

SIXTH GRADE

As soon as the poster for the middle school Winter Wonderland dance was put up, your heart fluttered in your chest. Who the heck was going to take you? You barely even had any friends at your new middle school, and sure, you talked to your best friend Josh still, but mainly because he was just in your neighborhood. You had sort of forgotten about each other ever since middle school started, and grew distant, especially since you went to different schools. So a day before the school dance, absolutely desperate for a date, you nervously walked over to his house, poster clutched in hand. Right as soon as you were about to knock on the door, to your surprise, the door swung open and you backed away, startled. “Oh,” Josh’s eyes went wide, realizing you were right there. The two of you burst into giggles, then he opened the door even wider, his eyes darting to the paper held in your hand as your eyes realized he was holding a paper in his. “Uh, I was just about to head over to your house actually.”

“That’s funny,” you gave a small laugh. “Looks like I beat you to it.”

“Yeah,” he nodded slowly. He looked nervous, the same unsure eyes, lower lip bite, fiddling thumbs, anxious expression on his face. You had known Josh for years, and by now, knew very well he had horrible anxiety. You put a hand on his shoulder, something you’d learned that sort of helped him breathe a little better.

“What’s up?” you asked.

“Uh, you can um, come inside,” he decided, ushering you in and letting you sit on the couch. When you got there, he sat next to you, taking a deep breath before unfolding the piece of paper in his hand and showing you. “So there’s this dance tomorrow and I know I’m sort of asking last minute, but everyone in the grade is going and I don’t really have a date and uh, I was wondering if you wanted to come with me maybe?”

“That’s what I was going to ask,” you chuckled, showing him your poster. “Looks like both of our dances are on the same day.”

“Well uh, maybe we don’t have to go to a dance at all,” he shrugged. “Maybe we can just get some milk and Oreos, come to my house, watch a movie?”

“That sounds a lot better than a school dance,” you admitted. “I don’t really care for social situations. Or dancing. Or people.”

“Me either,” he agreed.

“It’s a plan,” you grinned.

“Pinky promise?” he raised an eyebrow.

“Huh?” you wondered. “Oh gosh, I almost forgot about that.”

“How could you forget?” he chuckled.

“I don’t know,” you mumbled. “It’s been a while since we’ve hung out I guess.”

“Yeah,” he frowned. “So let’s make up for lost time tomorrow night then?”

“Definitely,” you smiled, hooking your pinky with his. “Pinky promise.”

HIGH SCHOOL Research papers, finals week, the end of the semester, standardized testing, all of it was getting to you. It was four in the morning and you had gone three days now without sleep, your bloodshot eyes staring at a computer screen for who knows how many hours now, the seventh empty cup of coffee sitting beside you, an empty bottle of caffeine pills rolling off the bed, and you just about to lose your mind. If this is how high school was, you couldn’t imagine college. So you brushed off the mess of papers and pencils from off your lap and walked outside, deciding to clear your head on a long walk. You started down your sidewalk, when all of a sudden, you felt something hit you in the back of your head. You did a double take, looking behind you, but finding nothing. Hell, as sleep deprived as you were, you wouldn’t be surprised if you were hallucinating or making things up. You began to walk down the sidewalk again when you felt something hit your back, and you looked behind you to hear a voice whisper your name from… above? Yeah, you must definitely be going insane. But you heard it again. “Y/n! Up here!” You turned around and looked up, blinking twice when you saw Josh outside of his open window, waving at you. “Don’t make me have to throw another eraser at you.”

“Is that what those were?” you scowled, looking at the ground and realizing that indeed, that’s what had caught your attention.

“Come here,” he beckoned. “I’m dying of boredom and I haven’t seen you since sixth grade.”

“Fine,” you complied with a smile.

“I’ll open up the back door,” he decided. You walked over to the backyard of his house and watched as he was waiting at the door, opening it up and ushering you inside, letting you up in his bedroom. When he finally closed the door and you sat beside him on his bed.

“Woah,” you laughed, looking at him.

“What?” he raised an eyebrow.

“You got gages,” you smiled. “And a nose ring.”

“Oh,” he chuckled. “Yeah. Pretty sick, huh?”

“I think it’s cool,” you nodded. “It’s been a while. What are you up to?”

“Studying,” he groaned, showing you the plethora of textbooks and notebooks that scattered his floor. “Judging by the dark rings around your eyes I’m guessing you’ve been doing the same?”

“Yeah,” you sighed. “Geez, I haven’t talked to you in forever.”

“I know,” he frowned. “I miss you. A lot.”

“Me too,” you agreed. “Hell, before we know it, we’ll both be in college.”

“That’s a scary thought,” his eyes grew wide. “It feels like just yesterday we were playing hide and seek in kindergarten.”

“I remember those days,” you chuckled. There were a couple seconds of silence before you decided to speak up again. “Hey, are we still going to be best friends after high school? I mean, we don’t talk anymore, and I know we’ve kind of grew distant but-”

“Y/n,” Josh laughed. “Are you crazy? Come on, we’re best friends forever. Remember?”

“Oh yeah,” you rolled your eyes. “Want to pinky promise?”

“Sure,” he giggled, hooking his pinky with yours and giving it a shake before meeting his gaze with yours. “But uh, I think maybe we’re getting a little old for pinky promises.”

“What do you mean?” you wondered, confused.

“I think we should come up with a different way of sealing promises,” he shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe, uh, a little of this?”

“A little of wha- oh woah!” you began to ask when he leaned in to kiss you. His lips pressed against yours and when he pulled away, you were both bright red, wide eyes, staring at each other. “Woah.”

“I really like you,” he whispered.

“Me too,” you gave a nervous smile. “But uh, I think I need to um, get back to studying. I have a research paper due tomorrow and some tests and I just…”

“It’s okay,” he nodded, turning sort of shy, not sure how to react. “Um, good luck.”

“Yeah,” you took a deep breath. “You too.”

Leaving the room, and then the house, walking down the sidewalk, you weren’t sure how to feel. Maybe you overreacted, maybe you should go back and apologize, maybe you should’ve at least kissed him back. It wasn’t like you didn’t like it, fuck, you loved it. You wanted more, but you couldn’t. Josh was your best friend forever, your pinky promise, your childhood crush. It would never escalate to anything more than that, right? You shook those thoughts out of your head, thinking maybe he just wasn’t thinking right, maybe this was just another crazy hallucination, maybe this was just even a dream, or just the sleep deprivation getting to you. Either way, you decided to go home, give up on homework, take a nap, and let all that happened fade away. That was the last time you talked to Josh since graduating college.

AFTER COLLEGE

Not to over exaggerate or anything, but your job actually sucked. After working your ass off in high school, getting a handful of years at college, and earning a degree, you were still stuck in your hometown working at a cheap coffee place making just a little more than minimum wage. You wished you could find a better job, or at least move out, but that costed who knows how much money, and you were still in student debt. It was a slow day, and you grew tired of staring at the empty atmosphere of the hotel, so you decided to get out from behind the counter and take a seat. You snatched a newspaper off the rack, made yourself a cup of coffee, and then sat down, flinging open the newspaper and starting to read. It was just the usual stories. Someone attempted to rob a nearby bank, a local bakery was closing down, there was a house fire a couple miles away, nothing much. You flipped the page, not really sure what to expect, but what you found absolutely blew you away. There he was, on a picture probably bigger than your thumb, memorable shining smile and those adorable squinty eyes, in your town newspaper. You read the headline: “Twenty One Pilots #1 on Top Charts.” Your eyes widened, staring more closely at the newspaper and doing a double take. Sure he looked different, but it was still him.

“Twenty One Pilots, consisting of band members Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun, a musical duo from Columbus, Ohio place number one on the Billboard Top Charts this week,” you read aloud. “Their hit single Stressed Out has soared to the top of the charts and instantly become a worldwide favorite. With their eerie melody, unique lyrics, and strange vibe, the duo’s new album Blurryface has also skyrocketed up the charts, giving them a newfound recognition and reputation within the music industry. With Joseph’s profound delivery of lyrics and Dun’s steady beat on the drums, combined, they create an absolutely irresistible record that will be sure to get you singing along.”

“What are you mumbling about?” one of your coworkers snapped. “You look like you just found the cure for cancer or something.”

“No, no,” you laughed. “Uh, one of my childhood friends, he’s in this band.”

“Twenty One Pilots?” they raised an eyebrow. “I’m surprised you’re just now hearing about this. They’ve been playing nonstop on the radio for the past couple weeks.”

“I don’t listen to the radio,” you narrowed your eyes.

“They’re on tour right now,” they explained. “If I’m right, they’re coming here in about a week I think. They’re sold out.”

“Shit,” you frowned. “I was hoping to talk to him.”

“Well if you’re friends like you say, just hit him up,” they shrugged. “I’m sure he’d be able to get you in. Which one is he? Tyler or Josh?”

“Josh,” you explained. “We went to elementary school together.”

“Wow, must’ve been a real long time then,” they raised their eyebrows.

“Not really,” you shrugged. “We still talked in high school a little bit.”

“Ah, I see,” they nodded their head slowly. “Well I wish you luck and all, but there’s some stuff that’s got to be done around here. No time for coffee breaks just yet. Just because we don’t have customers doesn’t mean we don’t have cleaning to do.”

“Right,” you sighed. “Just give me a minute, I want to finish this article. Cool?”

“Sure thing,” they decided.

The next couple days, your mind was spinning. You had looked up all you could about this band. In fact, you couldn’t even believe it was real. Although you had sort of forgotten about Josh in college, you hadn’t forgotten about your entire childhood with him. You remembered all the hide and seek games during kindergarten, the constant flirting in grade school, skipping out on the dance and cuddling with a movie in middle school, and even your awkward kiss in high school. You quickly learned about how famous they had become, listened to some of the music, which was actually extremely amazing, and watched a couple interviews. Some things about him had changed. He wasn’t as nervous as he used to be, he had dyed his hair different colors, he had lost the nose ring, and he was definitely more confident and looked happier. But some things about him never changed, such as his sunshine smile, the way his eyes crinkled up when he got happy, his little laugh, the way he stared into space when he was trying to think, the lower lip biting, the small things that made you fall in love with him. Hell, he hadn’t even told you he loved you, and you hadn’t done the same. He probably actually hated you, especially after everything that happened, how you ran away after he kissed you, how you ignored him after all those years, how it was like you just flushed every single pinky promise down the drain.

So you told yourself to forget about him. Even when you heard one of the songs play in the coffee shop, even when his face showed up on the front page of the newspaper, even when you saw a customer come in wearing one of his band’s t-shirts, you told yourself to forget. You forced yourself too. Your insecurities and doubt ate you up, convincing you that he didn’t want to talk to you, that he probably forgot about you a long time ago, how those stupid pinky promises were just figments of your imagination. You prepared yourself for the worst. You thought he’d never talk to you again. You thought he’d forgotten about you. You thought he was officially out of your life. And when you expected it the least, that’s when everything got flipped upside down.

YESTERDAY

As soon as he walked into the coffee shop, you wanted to disappear. Shrink, hide, just plain teleport out of there, anything to keep him from seeing you. It had been so long, and it had ended on such an awkward note, you felt like it would just be extremely strange to talk to him again. Much less, he was famous now. Hell, he probably met so many other people and went so many different places he wouldn’t even remember you. Wasn’t he dating Debby Ryan anyways? Oh right, you weren’t supposed to know that, you just happened to accidentally discover that when you were high key stalking him online. Ugh, sometimes you hated yourself. You were almost about to make a bee line to the drive thru line when your coworker pushed you towards the cash register. “This one’s yours,” they hinted.

“Fine,” you glared at them, turning around and not ready for when you came face to face with him, the only thing separating you being the counter. You swallowed nervously, looking around before meeting his eyes with yours. Ha, and he was supposed to be the one with anxiety. “Welcome to the café. What would you like to order?”

His colorful dyed hair, those dark cocoa brown eyes, the way he wore a backwards snapback, the X-Files tank top, his gages, even the way his lips tugged up at the side and he tilted his head, it made your stomach fill with butterflies. You couldn’t lie, you missed him. He had changed, but he was still Josh. “You don’t remember me?” he frowned, eyes as if they were trying to search for something in yours. “Come on, y/n.”

“It’s been a while,” you sighed.

“It always is,” he rolled his eyes. “These days, anyways.”

“Look at you,” you pointed out. “You’re basically a celebrity now.”

“Me?” he laughed. “Nah, I’m just another dude from Ohio.”

“Sure,” you gave a small smile. “So what would you like to order?”

“I’ll take a black coffee,” he shrugged. “Something simple, you know?”

“Yeah,” you nodded.

“But more importantly,” he cleared his throat. “I was wondering if maybe I could have dinner with you.”

“With me?” you raised an eyebrow. “Hell, why would you ever want that?”

“Y/n,” he narrowed his eyes. “I’d love that. It’s been so long.”

“Yeah, but I mean, I don’t know. You could literally have dinner with anyone in the entire world you wanted. You’re famous now,” you explained. “Why me?”

“You make it seem like I’m not even human anymore,” he rolled his eyes. “Come on. I’d love to catch up. Isn’t that our thing now? Not talk to each other for a million years and then all of a sudden pick up where we left off?”

“Pick up where we left off?” you repeated. “I believe that was a kiss.”

“Yeah,” he smirked. “It was.”

“You really want to pick up there?” you laughed.

“I wouldn’t mind,” he winked. “No, but really y/n. We should talk.”

“I missed you,” you admitted.

“I always miss you,” he told you. “You’re my best friend forever, remember?”

“How could I forget?” you chuckled. “But hey, how’d Tyler feel about that? It looks like he’s been your replacement best friend lately.”

“You were there before Tyler,” he whispered playfully. “And he’s my best friend. You’re my forever. Don’t forget that.” You both shared a moment of laughter for a second.

“So later, um, is that a dinner or…” your voice trailed off.

“Date?” he finished.

“I’m good either way,” you shrugged. “It’s been a while since I’ve been on a date though.”

“We never really dated before, have we?” he wondered.

“No,” you shook your head. “We haven’t actually.”

“I think we should give it a shot,” he grinned. “You?”

“I’m up for that,” you agreed. “Later this afternoon work for you?”

“That’s perfect,” he replied. “I’ll see you then.”

“Pinky promise?” you asked, smile curling up on your lips as you reached out your pinky to meet his.

“Pinky promise,” he burst out laughing. “Always and forever.”

TODAY

When you woke up, there were warm arms wrapped around you. The ghost of his lips pressed against your neck, the whisper of his words lingering in your mind, his dark eyes envisioned in your mind as you close yours. You fluttered opened your eyelids and yawned, turning around to face him. He smiled and you frowned. “You’ve been up this entire time?” you scowled.

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “You’re cute when you snore.”

“Shut up,” you rolled your eyes. “Don’t you have a show tonight?”

“Tonight,” he reminded. “I still have the entire morning to spend with you.”

“Won’t Tyler be wondering where you disappeared to?” you raised an eyebrow.

“Nah, he doesn’t need to know,” he reassured. “It’s just you and me right now, y/n.”

“Thank you,” you whispered. “For last night.”

“Anytime,” he smiled. “You know I’m always up for a tub of ice cream, a Disney movie, and a deep conversation.”

“Don’t forget cuddling,” you reminded.

“I never forget cuddling,” he sighed. “Who do you think I am?”

“Hey Josh?” you barely whispered. “Can I tell you something crazy?”

“Well knowing that you’re a crazy person, I assume everything you say is crazy,” he teased.

“Hey!” you giggled, playfully shoving him away. He captured you in his arms, pulling you closer towards him and pressing a soft kiss to your forehead.

“Yes, you can tell me anything,” he reassured.

You took a deep breath, closed your eyes, and then opened them, looking into his. There was something you read online once, something about how people’s eyes never change since the day they were born. That’s why babies’ eyes look so big, because their size doesn’t increase or decrease. The eyeball is the only organism that doesn’t grow from birth. It was something peculiar to think about, especially at then at all times and places, but you couldn’t help it. His eyes were something you had fallen in love with the first time you met them. You saw how big and full of concern they grew when he was worried, how they darted around the room when he was nervous, how they grew soft when he was sleepy, how dark and intense they could become when he was concentrated. But most importantly, you loved the way they became all squinty when he smiled. It meant he was happy, and more than anything, you wanted him to be happy. “I know this is long overdue,” you began. “But um…”

“Yeah?” he wondered, looking at you, the anticipation hanging thick in the air.

“I love you,” you told him. “I always have, Josh.”

“Really?” he asked. There was a pause. “Even when you ran away that night? The first time I kissed you? In high school?”

“Even then,” you nodded. “I guess, I don’t know. I was nervous and scared and didn’t know what to do. I was stupid.”

“Like I was in third grade,” he laughed.

“What?” you inquired.

“When I gave you that Valentine card and told you I liked you,” he recalled. “I was so terrified.”

“I remember that,” you chuckled.

“Hey y/n,” Josh cupped your cheek with his hand, gaze caught in yours. “I love you, too. Always have, always will.”

“Pinky promise?” you smirked.

“Pinky promise,” he grinned, both of you linking your pinkies together and giving it a good shake. He wrapped his arms around you and gave you a tight hug. “Listen, it doesn’t matter where I am, what I’m doing, or how much time has passed. You’ll always be my best friend forever, kiddo. And I’ll always love you.”

“I missed you so much,” you sighed, closing your eyes tight and getting lost in the embrace. “I promise I won’t run away this time.  Think I’m here to stay.”

“Yeah?” he wondered.

“Definitely,” you answered. “I don’t think I would last another million years without talking.”

“Me either,” he admitted. “I think I’m going to keep you for good this time.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” you smiled, pulling him in for a kiss. When you pulled away, he let out a small laugh. “What’s that for?”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all,” he shrugged. “You’ve never really been one for a kiss on the lips.”

“Well you said it yourself, remember?” you smiled. “We outgrew pinky promises in high school.”

“We’ll never outgrow pinky promises,” he laughed his eyes. “You know that as well as I do.”

“I guess so,” you joked.

“So um, you said something crazy. My turn?” he raised an eyebrow.

“Sure,” you decided.

“Would it be okay if, I don’t know, we were more than best friends?” he wondered. “Forever?”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Joshua Dun?” you asked.

“It sounds absolutely insane, but we’ve known each other for a little while now, and I know this is only our first actual date, but I want to live my entire life with you, y/n,” he whispered. His voice grew even softer. “I think I want to marry you.”

“Only if you seal it with an official pinky promise,” you decided with a grin.

“Then I pinky promise,” he reassured. “I promise to love you forever and always.”

“Then how could I ever say no?” you smiled.

[mathematicianadda]

(META) Concrete thinkers, incapable of metaphor, are gate-keeping mathematics and eroding its most powerful property: abstraction.

Earlier today, I posted about the fascinating similarity between fractals and logarithmic functions. Though it stated in the first line that it resided in the conceptual realm, a boo-boo w/ a metaphor I used got the post flamed by a literalist. I deleted it out of cowardice. I shouldn't have. Whoops. I'm not wrong to connect the two concepts. When I get better in these fields' Algebras*, more will be written on this. But it indicated a larger problem...

​

In Lex Fridman's podcast w/ Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown on YouTube (link below), he discussed 3 types of mathematicians: the puzzle-solvers, the physicists (broadly speaking here...), and those who "love abstraction and the power of generality." Certainly, this list is incomplete, but in a way that proves my point here. Throughout history, the mathematical greats who invented our studies in school, the Newtons and Eulers, were *wizards* of abstraction. Evidenced not only by their discoveries - take calculus, for example; the study of the behavior of infinitesimals - but by their prolific generations in disparate domains like Great Literature. Chock-full of metaphor and analogy, these thinkers thought deeply and solved even bigger problems. Through generality, they invented the frameworks our bachelor and grad degrees. They are our revered ancestors.

​

In the early 20th century, Abstractionists like Turing, Goedel, and the analytical demigod John von Neumann, trail blazed computational science. They needed insanely computationally complicated equations solved, so dammit, they put theirs minds to work. Using what they had already grasped, broke new ground via abstraction. We're indebted to the pioneer-class. They used their heads, drawing on intuition, the pattern-recognition software innate to homo sapiens.

​

Since the mid-1970s, it seems, (though cannot be verified via a gate-keeping function known as "peer review", check out Game Theory on Wikipedia for more information) that our technological prowess, the empirical furnace that has been alight since the dawn of the 17th century, has been burnt down to embers. Occasionally, we see a noteworthy digital innovation from the Valley. But outside of the strictly IT universe, astonishingly little. We go to college, then grad school, then some PhD program to learn complicated theories about complicated things so that we can handle minutia. Everything seems disparate because each course takes the top-down approach. We start at such a high level that half the class gets 65% on the first exam and drops out. The tech- or research-bound students are starving for some application, but the semester ends before that section of the textbook is covered. It almost seems malicious. The pattern-recognition software I referred to works from the ground up. It's quite clear for those familiar with psych and neuroscience. So if we are always fed the abstraction, our grass-roots, evolved, intuitive brains have nowhere to go with it. We can't perform the abstraction on our own, as they we're not allowed to have access to that part of the toolkit. We go into the workforce with a litany of equations our brains have vaguely mapped to {insert technical field here.} Then we wind up in sales jobs to pay the bills. In Business Schools (where I come from), it's even worse. They don't even apply calculus (dare I mention stochastic calculus or Brownian motion...spooky!) in economics class until grad school because they think our tiny Microsoft Excel brains would explode. For a concrete example here, it took me three years after college to the connect the dots on 'derivative', the tool of calculus, and 'derivative' the financial security class most known for its hand in 2008.

​

In any domain, when things begin to fall into place, divergent from complexity and into alignment, we find emergent simplicity. Our ancestors called it discovery, "innovation" better fits millennial vernacular. When things continue become increasingly muddled and complex, it's called stagnation. Stagnation in the Information Age no less. As a 24-year old debating a future in an expensive and unproductive graduate program or my soul's slow death in Big Corporate, I truly hope momentum will change on this one. Lets's ask more questions, make more mistakes, make more irresponsibly logical leaps (when the downside to said leap is low), do less incremental improvement, and math the s*** out of our future. Instead of worrying about today's hyped problem like the Middle East, climate change, {pick your favorite}, perhaps we could...maybe...just maybe...solve them? Let's use this beautiful, logical, intensely rigorous toolkit we've been gifted by our ancients, MATH, to solve the problems of the future.

​

PS - Please tear apart my ideas if you'd like. But, if you flame me ad-hominem style, you're just proving my point on this...gate-keeping ruins math.

_____

* Algebra is a anglo-bastardization (hope this isn't a swearword that get's me deleted) of 'al-jabr,' meaning 'bone-setting,' literally referring to how we move the 'bones' around on paper. Thank god the Arab world kept the mathematical lamp burning throughout the European Dark Ages. Why don't the literalists explain the meaning of this word...ever? Not even in high school? Because they take things for granted and don't read.

**I didn't make the mistake of apologizing for my learning issues in this post, unlike its predecessor. If you're still reading this, you're not the type to idiotically flame something thought out Reddit-style. Many mathematical greats have had issues in the over-structured, 100 equations in 30 minutes-classroom setting. Two examples are Albert Einstein and John Nash. The former worked in a patent-office because 1900s Barvaria didn't like that he was scatter-brained (or that he was Jewish; over-structured societies are more prone to racism, also known as tribal affinity); the latter, lived his 30s thru 70s deluded by the menacing condition of Paranoid Schizophrenia. The chiding he received in elementary, secondary, and university-level academia played a significant role in his social disconnect. See Isaacson's Einstein and Nassar's A Beautiful Mind to learn more. I'm not suggesting that I possess a mind bearing an ounce of resemblance with these legends, or any others. What I am suggesting, however, is that there are at least a few greats among us who are being crowded out of our institutions, and given an "ADHD"/"Dyslexic"/"Aspergers" diagnoses for their trouble. Why do we continue to call bright kids with learning superpowers 'learning disabled'?

*** Check out Lex Fridman's phenomenal podcast. Here's the link to the episode w/ Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown; one of the few who understand the power of intuition in mathematics.

https://lexfridman.com/grant-sanderson/

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[ryanssecurityengineering]

Week 7 Notes and Reflection

REFLECTION

Unfortunately I ran out of battery and lost the lectures notes for the second lecture. I had to reconstruct them using the class notes, Richard’s “slides” and what I remember. I’ll especially have to research more about Public Key Infrastructure later, it seems interesting!

Interesting lecture, I like how we found a mistake on the exam! I also liked the way Richard described Man in the middle attacks in Diffie-Hellman. There were lots of “homework” activities so I should do those! 

I thought it was pretty insane you can write to memory using %n in printf! I wonder what the designers of printf were thinking?! They were like “o ye lets scan in some stuff using our printing function!!” 

The extended lectures were cool - I found it weird that pressing that Command + S key on a Mac gives you root. There are so many interesting practical things with security... bug bounties, CTFs that you don’t really see in other areas of computing such as AI. 

NOTES

Mid Term Exam

Question 5 Solution - Can’t brute force it by hand. The answer is F - type I /Type II error tradeoff. 

Question 10 - The answer is D - easy to factorise a 64 bit number. Even 512 bit modulus is crackable. However even RSA is wrong for some reason.... All wrong!! 

Proof of liveness - Like a replay attack, challenge response. Proof that there is someone there. 

Richard expects you to go to all the lectures. Should have known Sun Tzu!

Diffie-Hellman - How do you set that shared secret up? 

5^3^7 is the same as 5^7^3. Power raising is associative. 

R -> 78125 -> S S-> 125 -> R

We don’t know R or S private key. Only the number they raised (5). Very difficult to solve the discrete log problem, to go backward to the private key. 

When both sides receive their key, they both raise the value by their private key. Both becomes the same. 

Forward Secrecy - protects the future messages.

Syria Castle - Defence in depth. The castle fell when the sieiging people forged a letter telling the castle people to surrender. Didn’t fall due to the defence of the castle.

CYBER LITERACY - VULNERABILITIES

A vulnerability is a weakness, and an exploit something that takes advantage of that.

Bug - software mistake. Sometimes bugs become vulnerability. 

Types

Memory corruption - somehow the bad guy can change something in memory to allow the program to be under the control of the bad guy.

Buffer overflow 

Stack and heap  - FIFO temporary info about the functions are on the stack. Heap for allocated memory - dynamic memory allocation. 

How functions are called in C - when control switches to another function, the function is frozen. Temporary info such as registers stored on stack. COMP1521 stuff.

Integer overflow - If you keep adding, it will go negative. This can cause it to maybe pass some tests. 

Format String - Like Bird flu - Everyone has written buffer overflow bad code in the old days! Then people started patching it. Apparently they are coming back. C has crazy way of printing stuff using printf(). In the old days when you wanted to print hello world had to use printf(”%s\n”, “Hello World”). However no ever did that. Everyone just writes printf(”Hello World\n”). However someone might write name <- get user name. Then you want to print the name you write printf(name). E.g. my name is “%s Richard Buckland”. It will try and look lower down in the stack and print that out as the argument. %s will print out the contents of the stack until a null character. You can use %x to print out the next byte and print out hexadecimal versions of the stack. Printf(”%x %x %x %x”). Shows entire contents of stack. Could have passwords, return addresses. %n WRITES TO MEMORY. You can do arbitrary writes to memory. 

Swiss Cheese - holes might line up! Holes overlapping and poke finger through. These sort of bugs are like that! Get lucky. 

Stack Canary? Research that. 

Shell Code - if you attacking a system, how nice it would be to get a private shell to come up and do whatever you want? Write some machine code that calls OS functions that makes shell pop up. This code is shell code. Put shell code into a buffer and run it.

Nop sleds - You can use buffer overflows to jump back to your buffer to run programs. However sometimes don’t know where in memory where the code is placed. Nice to have a bit of wiggle room. Just put lots of NOP operations - it will be like a slide into your code. Looking for NOP sleds - malware scanners. However whole lots of way to write NOP sleds without NOP.

If you find vulnerabilities, into will go into the National Vulnerability Database and CVN (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) and CNA (CVE Naming Authority). 

Responsible disclosure - If you find a vulnerability, tell the vendor then CERT(eg CERT Australia). or you can sell it to the bad guys!

OWASP Top 10 list should know for top 10 vulnerabilities. Essentially the same every year!

BUG PUZZLES - Check slides

Example 1 - Integer overflow for the length. Get_user_length is UNSIGNED, but length is signed.  Lots of implicit conversions between sign and unsigned. Then read will read the overflowed length value since read() takes in an unsigned length value, which might be bigger than 1024.

Example 2-  Optimistic indenting 

ASSETS

Security is to protect your assets. Sometimes we protect the wrong assets. Cold war - I wonder if the world will be here tomorrow?  The most important asset is to protect mankind. 

Door bell on the car - If you placed that in the car it went ding dong in his house. $5 car alarm first step into brilliance. What are you going to do when the ding dong happens? Might run down there and get killed!! The real asset is the window of the car, not the money! Leave the window open! Got wallet stolen, but got AIDS. Easy to protect the wrong thing. 

At the uni’s security review was all machines. Uni assets are students, reputation, user data, staff. The trick is, what you should do is the assets - what are you trying to protect? Ask people - junior, senior people. Review the list of assets every year/month. Real weakness is something you don’t see - blind spot. Try and find the things you haven’t seen. 

Strategies for Identifying the Assets

Regularly surveying the values of people of the involved in what you are protecting. Multiple pairs of eyes is a good asset.

Develop a sensible plan - well designed to tease this information out of them. Humans are generally poor at regurgitating everything they know, however they are generally very good critics.

Periodically revise current list of assets. Don't set and forget. Values and assets of an organisation can drift.

Examples

Team America

Richard's wallet vs Richard with AIDS

Car doorbell

Leave windows open?

Share registry - no more paper trails, everything is recorded electronically. Land title database was privatised. What are the risks?

Coke formula

Parliament - a collection of people that hold particular importance together.

Valuing the Assets - Defining what is important

Categorising types of assets

Tangible Assets: Those that are easily given a value

A gold chain valued at some relatively static amount

The jewellery in a jewellery store.

Intangible Assets: These cannot be easily and objectively be valued

Company secrets

Availability of services

Employee Morale & Security

Customer information

* Monetary + psychological/emotional costs

* Difficult <> Don't do

Examples:

Company secret - what is at stake?

QOS Guarantees

Strategies for assigning values to assets

Survey what many people think

no single person or group should be solely evaluating the assets&semi;

Examples of the information that should be gathered are as follows:

"How much money would you lose where this data center to go down for 24 hours?".

"How much will you lose if your company is disconnected to the internet for 3 hours?".

Examples

In assessing the value of a park

Picasso

Diffie-Hellman - Only provides confidentiality and integrity? Does not provide authentication. 

Web of Trust (PgP) - Research this

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

SSL/TLS

Read Bruce Schneier's paper https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-pki.pdf

passports (links photo with name, certified by office)

x509 certificates (links public key with domain (and maybe some other info))

padlock in your browser

look at some certs

CAs, root certificates, RAs, pay money to browser manufacturer??!! (check out your web browser)

conflicts of interest

most google search pages on SSL written by vendors

it was the blockchain of the 2000s

self signed, domain verification, organisational verification, extended verification.  (ha!)

what if anything are the risks of self-signed?

safety vs identity

the green bar

session keys - the TLS handshake (4 keys)

why use session keys rather than using RSA for all?

wildcards

3 main certificate authorities: Symantec, Comodo, GoDaddy

homework : find examples of (serious) fraudulant certificates being issued

Certificates don’t protect against gooooogle.com

TLS handshake example

BUG BOUNTIES (From notes, I lost mine)

Crowd-Sourced Bug Bounty Websites

Public: Hackerone, bugcrowd

Private: Synack

Often have criteria of whats in/out of scope, as well as what kind of bugs they won’t accept. For example websites that they don’t want you touch

Tips

Learn web apps

Usea a wide scope → bigger net = more bugs

Look for software updates, or assets that have recently changed

Look for publicly disclosed reports → Can see prior bugs that have been found/exposed. If a bug has occurred once, theres a chance it will occur again

Pentesting  (From notes, I lost mine)

Fuzzing

Automate process - a program that continually adds input

Some fuzzers are aware of input structure, and some even are away of program structure

Fuzzers aren't precise, but can test a large amount of inputs

Fuzzing software - afl (the way to go apparently)

Mutation strategies - bit flips, byte flips, arithmetic, havoc (combination

Use fuzzing to test your own software

Homework: Do the fuzzing tutorial

[airoasis]

How to stop screwing yourself over | Mel Robbins | TEDxSF

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-stop-screwing-yourself-over-mel-robbins-tedxsf-3/

How to stop screwing yourself over | Mel Robbins | TEDxSF

Translator: Judith Matz Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic better welcome! Hey, San Francisco! TEDx oh my God, blinding gentle! Hello, every body! How are you? (audience cheering) fine?! Oh my gosh! Okay, so… My title is Mel Robbins, and for the final seventeen years, i have completed nothing however help individuals get everything that they need. Within intent! My husband’s here. So, I’ve completed it in the court docket, in the boardroom, within the bed room, in humans’s residing room, something room you want to be in, if i am there, i will support you get something you wish to have in anyway integral.For the last three years I host a syndicated radio show. Five days per week, i’m going reside in forty cities and i speak to men and females throughout the united states who suppose caught. Have you learnt that a 3rd of american citizens consider disenchanted with their lives correct now? That could be a hundred million humans! That is insane! And i’ve come nose to nose with it in this new exhibit that i am doing, which can also be insane, it’s known as "In-legal guidelines". I transfer in with families across the united states (Laughter) You guessed it! Who are at conflict with their in-laws. We move them into the identical residence, I verbally assassinate every person, we open up Pandora’s box, and that i get people to stop arguing in regards to the donuts and who is website hosting Thanksgiving dinner, and talk about the true stuff.And that’s what I wish to talk to you about. I am here for you. I will let you know everything i know in less than eighteen minutes about get what you need. So i need you to take a millisecond correct now and believe about what you need. You! And i want you to be selfish. Screw Simon and the "We" thing. That is about me, proper now! (Laughter) (Applause) Sorry, Simon. What do you want? And here is the deal. I don’t need it to sound good to different persons. Being healthful will not get your ass on a treadmill. Shedding your manboobs, so you can connect with a person, now that is motivation. (Laughter) So, I need to know: What do you need? Do you want to lose weight? Do you wish to have to triple your earnings? Do you wish to have to a nonprofit? Do you want to seek out love? What is it? Get it, correct right here.You understand what it’s, don’t analyze it to death, just decide upon anything. That is a part of the situation. You will not select. So, we’re going to be talking about the way you get what you need. And admittedly, getting what you want is discreet. But realize I didn’t say it used to be effortless. It’s very simple. Actually, if you think about it, we reside in probably the most strong second in time. In order that factor that you have up right here, whatever it can be, you want to use healthy consuming to cure your diabetes, you need to determine the right way to care for the elders and start a brand new hospice middle, you wish to have to maneuver to Africa and construct a school… Bet what? That you can stroll into a guide retailer proper now! And purchase as a minimum ten books written by credentialed gurus on how the hell you do it.You would Google it. And you could most commonly in finding at least, I do not know – a thousand blogs documenting the step, by using step, via step transformation that someone else is already doing. One can find someone online and cyber-stalk them! (Laughter) that you may simply walk in their footsteps just use the science of drafting. Comply with what everybody else has completed, because anyone is already doing it! So why do not you might have what you want, if in case you have all the expertise that you simply need, you might have the contacts that you just need, there are often free instruments online that enable you to a industry, or become a member of a gaggle, or do some thing the heck you wish to have!? All of it comes down to one word: F*#.Shut the entrance door, you realize what i’m speakme about? The f-bomb. It can be all over the place! You hear it at all times! I truthfully do not comprehend what the appeal is of the word. I mean, you do not sound smart whilst you say it. And it’s rather no longer expressing how you rather think. It’s variety of a low cost shot to take. And of path you realize i am talking in regards to the word "great". "how you doing?" "Oh, i’m fine." Oh, quite? You are? Dragging round these further forty pounds, you are high-quality? Feeling like roommates together with your partner, and you are first-rate? You haven’t had sex in four months, you are high-quality? Fairly?! I don’t feel so! However see, here is the handle saying that you’re quality: it’s honestly genius.When you consider that if you are nice, you do not have got to do something about it. However whilst you consider about this phrase "nice", it just makes me so indignant. Right here we’re at a convention about being alive and you are going to describe the experience of being alive as "best"?! What a flimsy and feeble phrase! If you’re crappy, say you’re crappy! If you’re effective say you’re robust! Inform the truth! And this now not most effective goes for the social assemble: "Oh, i do not need to burden you with the truth that I hate my existence", or: "hello, i am strong! However that would make you believe terrible." The larger obstacle The greater issue with "exceptional" is that you say it to yourself.That thing that you need, I guarantee you, you will have convinced your self that you are high-quality not having it. That is why you’re not pushing your self. It is the areas for your existence the place you could have given up. Where you could have said, "Oh, i am first-rate. My mother’s by no means going to alter, so I simply can’t have that conversation." "i’m pleasant. We have now bought to wait unless the youngsters graduate, before we get divorced, so we will just sleep in separate bedrooms." "i am excellent.I lost my job, i will be able to barely pay my expenses, but anything it can be difficult to get a job." one of the causes why this word additionally simply annoys me a lot is, scientists have calculated Oh yeah, i’m coming down! (Laughter) Scientists have calculated the chances of you being born. That’s proper. They’ve crunched the numbers. I see you up there. They’ve crunched the numbers on you Yeah, you guys standing up, you wish to have to sit down down for this. They’ve crunched the numbers on you being born. And so they took into consideration all the wars, and the common mess ups, and the dinosaurs, and everything else. And do you understand that the percentages, the chances of you, yeah, right right here, put your computer away, get up for me, Doug! (Laughter) So the chances of Doug here, turn around, say "hi" to everybody the odds of Doug being born at the moment in time he used to be born, to the parents you were born to, with the DNA structure that you’ve got, one in four hundred trillion! Isn’t that potent? Doug: i’m so lucky! Mel: yes! You’re now not exceptional, you’re outstanding! You’ve gotten existence-changing recommendations for a intent, and it’s not to torture yourself.Thanks. Thank you, Doug. (Applause) Christine used to be proper when she mentioned all of you could be on stage. Due to the fact that all of you we’re all in this class. One in four hundred trillion. All day long you’ve gotten strategies that could exchange your lifestyles, that would trade the world, that would alternate the best way that you feel, and what do you do with them? Nothing! (Grunts) expectantly I won’t moon you. (Laughter) You did not pay for that. (Laughter) And i would like you to simply feel for a minute, given that we all have i love to make use of the analogy "the internal snooze button" you may have these strong strategies that bubble up. You have been staring at individuals all day and i assurance you, like ping pong balls bam-bam-bam and everytime you’ve an idea, what do you do? Hit the snooze! What is the first decision you made this morning? I wager it used to be to return to mattress. "Yeah, first resolution at present, i’m one in four hundred trillion, i am going to go back to sleep." and that i get it! Your mattress is comfortable! It is cosy, it is heat! If you’re lucky, you have got got a person that you simply love next to you, or in my case, I’ve acquired my husband and my two children and almost certainly the dog.And the reason why i am bringing up this first determination that you simply made in these days, and the inside snooze alarm, is for the reason that in any area of your existence that you need to change, any there is one fact that you just ought to recognize. This one: you are not ever going to think like it. Ever. No person’s coming, motivation isn’t taking place, you’re certainly not going to suppose love it. Scientists call it activation power. That’s what they name the drive required to get you to vary from what you are doing on autopilot to do some thing new.So do this test the next day to come. You consider you��re so fancy, i do know, you’re attending TED. (Laughter) try this. The next day to come morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes prior. After which when it goes off, take those sheets, throw them off, and get up and begin your day. No snooze, no lengthen, no, "i’ll just wait here for five seconds considering the fact that Mel’s no longer standing here" Do it. And the rationale why i need you to do it’s since you’re going to come face to face with the bodily, and that i imply physical drive that’s required to alter your habits. Do you consider that anyone who wants to drop some weight ever appears like occurring a food plan? Of direction now not! You believe they ever feel like consuming boiled chicken and peas instead of a croissant? I don’t believe so! The activation power required to get your ass away out of your computer and out the entrance door, to move on the stroll, you mentioned that you simply have been going to move on, is the special same quantity of force that it takes you to push yourself out of a heat bed and into a bloodless room.What’s fascinating about being an adult is that while you grow to be eighteen, nobody tells you that it is now going to be your job to guardian your self. And by means of "guardian your self", I imply it is your job to make your self do the crap you do not need to do, so that you may be the whole lot that you are purported to be. And you’re so damn busy waiting to consider like it. And you’re in no way going to! My son in no way appears like getting off his DS. That is my job! Get off the rattling DS! Kendall, clean up the Barbies! If you are going to have a nude occasion in my rest room, as a minimum smooth it up! (Laughter) God, chunk with your mouth closed! We’re no longer a barn, for crying out loud! All right, dinner is coming, get out of the pantry. As mother and father, and also you were a kid, your mom and dad make you do the matters you don’t think like doing. Considering you will not. Ever. Not now, not then, not ever! And even when you get excellent at some thing, you can figure out some thing else you don’t want to do.After which you’ll plateau out, get bored, "I hate this job. Blah blah boring." but will you seem for a brand new one? No! You’ll just bitch about that one. It is very, very simple to get what you want. But it’s no longer easy. You have to force yourself. And that i imply drive. And the reason why i exploit the word "drive" when Roz was once up right here and talking in regards to the emotion monitoring, and she or he had the image of two sides of the mind I appear at the mind the exact identical way. Handiest I describe one part of your brain as autopilot and the opposite part as emergency brake. That’s the only two speeds you get: autopilot, emergency brake. And bet which one your brain likes better: autopilot. You have had the experience where you might have driven to work and also you get there and you’re like, "Oh my God, i do not consider ever riding right here." (Laughter) you were not drunk! That was your mind on autopilot. It used to be functioning simply at this stage. And the quandary with your intellect is that every time you do anything that’s unique out of your typical routine, bet what your mind does emergency brake! And it has that response for the whole thing. The whole lot! You stroll into the kitchen and see each person’s left their breakfast dishes for you.And also you believe for the hundredth time, "i will kill them. Actually i’m gonna go away it here and i will make them do it." but that’s now not your common movements, is it? So your mind goes: emergency brake! And you go correct into autopilot. "i’ll just load it, and be pissed, after which not have intercourse. That’s what i will do." (Laughter) (Applause) So, after I say "drive", whatever that’s a wreck from your pursuits is going to require force. And for those who believe about your existence, it is style of funny because we are kids and then we emerge as adults, and we spend a lot time looking to push our lifestyles into some type of steady hobbies, after which we grow bored of it! You wake up even as day-to-day, you’ve largely the identical breakfast, you pressure to work the equal manner, show up at work, seem busy, hinder making calls, replace facebook, you attend a meeting and doodle the entire time, return and replace facebook, make plans for the evening, you look busy some more, then force dwelling the identical way, you consume mostly the identical dinner or a form of it, you watch the same variety of media, and then you definately go to bed, and do the identical thing all over once more! No wonder you’re bored out of your intellect! It’s the pursuits that is killing you.I’ve this concept about why men and women get caught in existence. So, most of you’ve gotten mainly taken your common Psych one zero one class, and you’ve bumped into Abraham Maslow’s "Hierarchy of desires"? Well, your physique is kinda cool. Due to the fact you’ve these basic needs. And your physique is wired to ship you alerts. If you would like food, what do you think? If you need water, what do you think? If you would like intercourse, what do you believe? (Laughter) thanks. I feel while you suppose caught or upset on your life, it is a signal. And it is not a sign that your lifestyles is damaged. It is a signal that one in every of your most simple desires are usually not being met. Your need for exploration. The whole thing about your lifestyles, about your physique, grows! Your cells regenerate, your hair, your nails, everything grows in your whole existence. And your soul wishes exploration and development. And the one manner you’ll be able to get it is by using forcing yourself to be uncomfortable.Forcing your self to get outside, out of your head. Thank you. If you are in your head, you are behind enemy strains. That isn’t God speakme, ok? It is not! Correctly, if I put a speaker on it and we broadcast what you say to yourself, we’d institutionalize you. (Laughter) you would not hang out with folks that speak to you the best way you talk to yourself. So get out of your head! Your feelings! Your feelings are screwing you! I do not care the way you feel! I care about what you need! And for those who take heed to how you think, on the subject of what you wish to have you’re going to not get it.Given that you will not ever feel like it. And you have got to get outside your comfort zone. It can be now not about taking risks, it’s about getting external your alleviation zone. These first three seconds whilst you push your self away from bed, they blow. However as soon as you’re up, it’s pleasant. These first three seconds when you’re sitting right here in a stadium like this and a person says, "rise up and are available dance," and you believe, "Oh, I will have to do this," after which you are like, "Uhmm." that experience that you simply had when you had the impulse to do it and you then did not do the activation vigor required to drive your self, your emergency brake received pulled "i am sitting correct here.I am not going up with these loopy humans, i don’t like to dance…" What occurred for me is I came up, and i ran into Rachel, after which we began speakme, and subsequent thing , she’s tweeting. And we’re pals. And growth! Get outside. That is where the magic is. That’s where the one in 4 hundred trillion exists. So the whole thing I do oh, adequate, this is the final phase. Sorry. So one more factor that you need to use, I call it the five-second-rule. Your intellect can method a facial expression in 33 milliseconds. It may well transfer beautiful rattling speedy. The opposite thing that it does very swiftly is when you’ve got a kind of little impulses that are pulling you, if you happen to don’t marry it with an action within 5 seconds, you pull the emergency brake and kill the thought. Kill it! If you have the impulse to rise up and are available dance while the band is enjoying, if you do not get up in five seconds, you’re going to tug the emergency brake.If in case you have an impulse about, you had been influenced by a person’s speech in these days, and you don’t do something within 5 seconds write a note, ship yourself a text some thing bodily to marry it with the proposal, you’re going to pull the emergency brake and kill the thought. Your problem isn’t recommendations. Your concern is you don’t act on them. You kill them. It is no longer my fault. It is now not any individual’s fault. You’re doing it to your self. Discontinue it! I’m reckoning on you. One in four hundred trillion. You got stuff to do! And it’s not going to occur in your head. So i want you to follow this at present. Once we go off to party, thank God it’s coming soon, in view that I think all of us would use a cocktail, i would like you to apply the five-2nd-rule. You see an individual and you suppose you have got an impulse, they seem interesting? Stroll over there! You had been encouraged by way of anyone and you’ve got a request? Make it! That is why you’re here! Experiment with it, and that i believe you’ll be able to be greatly surprised about what happens.And a different thing, i want you to grasp that everything that I do, whether or not it’s the radio exhibit, or the television show, or the guide that I wrote, or the column, it’s for you. And if there may be something that i can do, if i will be able to do some thing to make you do the things you do not need to do, so you could have what you want, i will do it. However you have got to stroll over, you ought to open your mouth, and you must make the request. You received it? Just right. Go do it. (Applause) thank you! Thanks, yes! Rise up! You’ve gotten the impulse, arise! Thank you! .

[batterymonster2021]

How to stop screwing yourself over | Mel Robbins | TEDxSF

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-stop-screwing-yourself-over-mel-robbins-tedxsf-3/

How to stop screwing yourself over | Mel Robbins | TEDxSF

Translator: Judith Matz Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic better welcome! Hey, San Francisco! TEDx oh my God, blinding gentle! Hello, every body! How are you? (audience cheering) fine?! Oh my gosh! Okay, so… My title is Mel Robbins, and for the final seventeen years, i have completed nothing however help individuals get everything that they need. Within intent! My husband’s here. So, I’ve completed it in the court docket, in the boardroom, within the bed room, in humans’s residing room, something room you want to be in, if i am there, i will support you get something you wish to have in anyway integral.For the last three years I host a syndicated radio show. Five days per week, i’m going reside in forty cities and i speak to men and females throughout the united states who suppose caught. Have you learnt that a 3rd of american citizens consider disenchanted with their lives correct now? That could be a hundred million humans! That is insane! And i’ve come nose to nose with it in this new exhibit that i am doing, which can also be insane, it’s known as "In-legal guidelines". I transfer in with families across the united states (Laughter) You guessed it! Who are at conflict with their in-laws. We move them into the identical residence, I verbally assassinate every person, we open up Pandora’s box, and that i get people to stop arguing in regards to the donuts and who is website hosting Thanksgiving dinner, and talk about the true stuff.And that’s what I wish to talk to you about. I am here for you. I will let you know everything i know in less than eighteen minutes about get what you need. So i need you to take a millisecond correct now and believe about what you need. You! And i want you to be selfish. Screw Simon and the "We" thing. That is about me, proper now! (Laughter) (Applause) Sorry, Simon. What do you want? And here is the deal. I don’t need it to sound good to different persons. Being healthful will not get your ass on a treadmill. Shedding your manboobs, so you can connect with a person, now that is motivation. (Laughter) So, I need to know: What do you need? Do you want to lose weight? Do you wish to have to triple your earnings? Do you wish to have to a nonprofit? Do you want to seek out love? What is it? Get it, correct right here.You understand what it’s, don’t analyze it to death, just decide upon anything. That is a part of the situation. You will not select. So, we’re going to be talking about the way you get what you need. And admittedly, getting what you want is discreet. But realize I didn’t say it used to be effortless. It’s very simple. Actually, if you think about it, we reside in probably the most strong second in time. In order that factor that you have up right here, whatever it can be, you want to use healthy consuming to cure your diabetes, you need to determine the right way to care for the elders and start a brand new hospice middle, you wish to have to maneuver to Africa and construct a school… Bet what? That you can stroll into a guide retailer proper now! And purchase as a minimum ten books written by credentialed gurus on how the hell you do it.You would Google it. And you could most commonly in finding at least, I do not know – a thousand blogs documenting the step, by using step, via step transformation that someone else is already doing. One can find someone online and cyber-stalk them! (Laughter) that you may simply walk in their footsteps just use the science of drafting. Comply with what everybody else has completed, because anyone is already doing it! So why do not you might have what you want, if in case you have all the expertise that you simply need, you might have the contacts that you just need, there are often free instruments online that enable you to a industry, or become a member of a gaggle, or do some thing the heck you wish to have!? All of it comes down to one word: F*#.Shut the entrance door, you realize what i’m speakme about? The f-bomb. It can be all over the place! You hear it at all times! I truthfully do not comprehend what the appeal is of the word. I mean, you do not sound smart whilst you say it. And it’s rather no longer expressing how you rather think. It’s variety of a low cost shot to take. And of path you realize i am talking in regards to the word "great". "how you doing?" "Oh, i’m fine." Oh, quite? You are? Dragging round these further forty pounds, you are high-quality? Feeling like roommates together with your partner, and you are first-rate? You haven’t had sex in four months, you are high-quality? Fairly?! I don’t feel so! However see, here is the handle saying that you’re quality: it’s honestly genius.When you consider that if you are nice, you do not have got to do something about it. However whilst you consider about this phrase "nice", it just makes me so indignant. Right here we’re at a convention about being alive and you are going to describe the experience of being alive as "best"?! What a flimsy and feeble phrase! If you’re crappy, say you’re crappy! If you’re effective say you’re robust! Inform the truth! And this now not most effective goes for the social assemble: "Oh, i do not need to burden you with the truth that I hate my existence", or: "hello, i am strong! However that would make you believe terrible." The larger obstacle The greater issue with "exceptional" is that you say it to yourself.That thing that you need, I guarantee you, you will have convinced your self that you are high-quality not having it. That is why you’re not pushing your self. It is the areas for your existence the place you could have given up. Where you could have said, "Oh, i am first-rate. My mother’s by no means going to alter, so I simply can’t have that conversation." "i’m pleasant. We have now bought to wait unless the youngsters graduate, before we get divorced, so we will just sleep in separate bedrooms." "i am excellent.I lost my job, i will be able to barely pay my expenses, but anything it can be difficult to get a job." one of the causes why this word additionally simply annoys me a lot is, scientists have calculated Oh yeah, i’m coming down! (Laughter) Scientists have calculated the chances of you being born. That’s proper. They’ve crunched the numbers. I see you up there. They’ve crunched the numbers on you Yeah, you guys standing up, you wish to have to sit down down for this. They’ve crunched the numbers on you being born. And so they took into consideration all the wars, and the common mess ups, and the dinosaurs, and everything else. And do you understand that the percentages, the chances of you, yeah, right right here, put your computer away, get up for me, Doug! (Laughter) So the chances of Doug here, turn around, say "hi" to everybody the odds of Doug being born at the moment in time he used to be born, to the parents you were born to, with the DNA structure that you’ve got, one in four hundred trillion! Isn’t that potent? Doug: i’m so lucky! Mel: yes! You’re now not exceptional, you’re outstanding! You’ve gotten existence-changing recommendations for a intent, and it’s not to torture yourself.Thanks. Thank you, Doug. (Applause) Christine used to be proper when she mentioned all of you could be on stage. Due to the fact that all of you we’re all in this class. One in four hundred trillion. All day long you’ve gotten strategies that could exchange your lifestyles, that would trade the world, that would alternate the best way that you feel, and what do you do with them? Nothing! (Grunts) expectantly I won’t moon you. (Laughter) You did not pay for that. (Laughter) And i would like you to simply feel for a minute, given that we all have i love to make use of the analogy "the internal snooze button" you may have these strong strategies that bubble up. You have been staring at individuals all day and i assurance you, like ping pong balls bam-bam-bam and everytime you’ve an idea, what do you do? Hit the snooze! What is the first decision you made this morning? I wager it used to be to return to mattress. "Yeah, first resolution at present, i’m one in four hundred trillion, i am going to go back to sleep." and that i get it! Your mattress is comfortable! It is cosy, it is heat! If you’re lucky, you have got got a person that you simply love next to you, or in my case, I’ve acquired my husband and my two children and almost certainly the dog.And the reason why i am bringing up this first determination that you simply made in these days, and the inside snooze alarm, is for the reason that in any area of your existence that you need to change, any there is one fact that you just ought to recognize. This one: you are not ever going to think like it. Ever. No person’s coming, motivation isn’t taking place, you’re certainly not going to suppose love it. Scientists call it activation power. That’s what they name the drive required to get you to vary from what you are doing on autopilot to do some thing new.So do this test the next day to come. You consider you’re so fancy, i do know, you’re attending TED. (Laughter) try this. The next day to come morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes prior. After which when it goes off, take those sheets, throw them off, and get up and begin your day. No snooze, no lengthen, no, "i’ll just wait here for five seconds considering the fact that Mel’s no longer standing here" Do it. And the rationale why i need you to do it’s since you’re going to come face to face with the bodily, and that i imply physical drive that’s required to alter your habits. Do you consider that anyone who wants to drop some weight ever appears like occurring a food plan? Of direction now not! You believe they ever feel like consuming boiled chicken and peas instead of a croissant? I don’t believe so! The activation power required to get your ass away out of your computer and out the entrance door, to move on the stroll, you mentioned that you simply have been going to move on, is the special same quantity of force that it takes you to push yourself out of a heat bed and into a bloodless room.What’s fascinating about being an adult is that while you grow to be eighteen, nobody tells you that it is now going to be your job to guardian your self. And by means of "guardian your self", I imply it is your job to make your self do the crap you do not need to do, so that you may be the whole lot that you are purported to be. And you’re so damn busy waiting to consider like it. And you’re in no way going to! My son in no way appears like getting off his DS. That is my job! Get off the rattling DS! Kendall, clean up the Barbies! If you are going to have a nude occasion in my rest room, as a minimum smooth it up! (Laughter) God, chunk with your mouth closed! We’re no longer a barn, for crying out loud! All right, dinner is coming, get out of the pantry. As mother and father, and also you were a kid, your mom and dad make you do the matters you don’t think like doing. Considering you will not. Ever. Not now, not then, not ever! And even when you get excellent at some thing, you can figure out some thing else you don’t want to do.After which you’ll plateau out, get bored, "I hate this job. Blah blah boring." but will you seem for a brand new one? No! You’ll just bitch about that one. It is very, very simple to get what you want. But it’s no longer easy. You have to force yourself. And that i imply drive. And the reason why i exploit the word "drive" when Roz was once up right here and talking in regards to the emotion monitoring, and she or he had the image of two sides of the mind I appear at the mind the exact identical way. Handiest I describe one part of your brain as autopilot and the opposite part as emergency brake. That’s the only two speeds you get: autopilot, emergency brake. And bet which one your brain likes better: autopilot. You have had the experience where you might have driven to work and also you get there and you’re like, "Oh my God, i do not consider ever riding right here." (Laughter) you were not drunk! That was your mind on autopilot. It used to be functioning simply at this stage. And the quandary with your intellect is that every time you do anything that’s unique out of your typical routine, bet what your mind does emergency brake! And it has that response for the whole thing. The whole lot! You stroll into the kitchen and see each person’s left their breakfast dishes for you.And also you believe for the hundredth time, "i will kill them. Actually i’m gonna go away it here and i will make them do it." but that’s now not your common movements, is it? So your mind goes: emergency brake! And you go correct into autopilot. "i’ll just load it, and be pissed, after which not have intercourse. That’s what i will do." (Laughter) (Applause) So, after I say "drive", whatever that’s a wreck from your pursuits is going to require force. And for those who believe about your existence, it is style of funny because we are kids and then we emerge as adults, and we spend a lot time looking to push our lifestyles into some type of steady hobbies, after which we grow bored of it! You wake up even as day-to-day, you’ve largely the identical breakfast, you pressure to work the equal manner, show up at work, seem busy, hinder making calls, replace facebook, you attend a meeting and doodle the entire time, return and replace facebook, make plans for the evening, you look busy some more, then force dwelling the identical way, you consume mostly the identical dinner or a form of it, you watch the same variety of media, and then you definately go to bed, and do the identical thing all over once more! No wonder you’re bored out of your intellect! It’s the pursuits that is killing you.I’ve this concept about why men and women get caught in existence. So, most of you’ve gotten mainly taken your common Psych one zero one class, and you’ve bumped into Abraham Maslow’s "Hierarchy of desires"? Well, your physique is kinda cool. Due to the fact you’ve these basic needs. And your physique is wired to ship you alerts. If you would like food, what do you think? If you need water, what do you think? If you would like intercourse, what do you believe? (Laughter) thanks. I feel while you suppose caught or upset on your life, it is a signal. And it is not a sign that your lifestyles is damaged. It is a signal that one in every of your most simple desires are usually not being met. Your need for exploration. The whole thing about your lifestyles, about your physique, grows! Your cells regenerate, your hair, your nails, everything grows in your whole existence. And your soul wishes exploration and development. And the one manner you’ll be able to get it is by using forcing yourself to be uncomfortable.Forcing your self to get outside, out of your head. Thank you. If you are in your head, you are behind enemy strains. That isn’t God speakme, ok? It is not! Correctly, if I put a speaker on it and we broadcast what you say to yourself, we’d institutionalize you. (Laughter) you would not hang out with folks that speak to you the best way you talk to yourself. So get out of your head! Your feelings! Your feelings are screwing you! I do not care the way you feel! I care about what you need! And for those who take heed to how you think, on the subject of what you wish to have you’re going to not get it.Given that you will not ever feel like it. And you have got to get outside your comfort zone. It can be now not about taking risks, it’s about getting external your alleviation zone. These first three seconds whilst you push your self away from bed, they blow. However as soon as you’re up, it’s pleasant. These first three seconds when you’re sitting right here in a stadium like this and a person says, "rise up and are available dance," and you believe, "Oh, I will have to do this," after which you are like, "Uhmm." that experience that you simply had when you had the impulse to do it and you then did not do the activation vigor required to drive your self, your emergency brake received pulled "i am sitting correct here.I am not going up with these loopy humans, i don’t like to dance…" What occurred for me is I came up, and i ran into Rachel, after which we began speakme, and subsequent thing , she’s tweeting. And we’re pals. And growth! Get outside. That is where the magic is. That’s where the one in 4 hundred trillion exists. So the whole thing I do oh, adequate, this is the final phase. Sorry. So one more factor that you need to use, I call it the five-second-rule. Your intellect can method a facial expression in 33 milliseconds. It may well transfer beautiful rattling speedy. The opposite thing that it does very swiftly is when you’ve got a kind of little impulses that are pulling you, if you happen to don’t marry it with an action within 5 seconds, you pull the emergency brake and kill the thought. Kill it! If you have the impulse to rise up and are available dance while the band is enjoying, if you do not get up in five seconds, you’re going to tug the emergency brake.If in case you have an impulse about, you had been influenced by a person’s speech in these days, and you don’t do something within 5 seconds write a note, ship yourself a text some thing bodily to marry it with the proposal, you’re going to pull the emergency brake and kill the thought. Your problem isn’t recommendations. Your concern is you don’t act on them. You kill them. It is no longer my fault. It is now not any individual’s fault. You’re doing it to your self. Discontinue it! I’m reckoning on you. One in four hundred trillion. You got stuff to do! And it’s not going to occur in your head. So i want you to follow this at present. Once we go off to party, thank God it’s coming soon, in view that I think all of us would use a cocktail, i would like you to apply the five-2nd-rule. You see an individual and you suppose you have got an impulse, they seem interesting? Stroll over there! You had been encouraged by way of anyone and you’ve got a request? Make it! That is why you’re here! Experiment with it, and that i believe you’ll be able to be greatly surprised about what happens.And a different thing, i want you to grasp that everything that I do, whether or not it’s the radio exhibit, or the television show, or the guide that I wrote, or the column, it’s for you. And if there may be something that i can do, if i will be able to do some thing to make you do the things you do not need to do, so you could have what you want, i will do it. However you have got to stroll over, you ought to open your mouth, and you must make the request. You received it? Just right. Go do it. (Applause) thank you! Thanks, yes! Rise up! You’ve gotten the impulse, arise! Thank you! .

[myrobertallen-blog]

Videosly Review and huge bonus

Videosly Allows You To Produce Videos Quicker Than Ever. Videosly's advanced modern technology does something no other software program can, it permits you to pick and choose the EXACT web content you want in your video.

Official site: http://www.socialleadfreak.com/videosly-review/

Seems simple, but do not forget that if you're cooking anything on a heater, you could constantly transform it off and also fire points numerous times if you should. Lighting Uniformity This is where if you're shooting with all-natural light, you're going to encounter some trouble. I don't want to blow your mind right here with some insane scientific research knowledge, but we keep spinning around the sun and that indicates that natural light is constantly changing. Just what this means for your video clip is when you sufficed together, you'll see various levels of illumination as well as it will not look as tidy. If all-natural light is your only option, wish for a gloomy day or a sunny day with indirect light and aim to obtain all of your recording done as snugly as possible to decrease the change in light. If you're utilizing synthetic light, make certain you're shutting shades, blinds, doors, the darker the far better if it's daytime. Aim for the Edit Shooting for the edit implies that you're not just shooting the procedure, you're considering how it will certainly go together when you're modifying the video. It likewise means providing on your own alternatives. Any time we fire something that doesn't entail an undoable activity, we shoot numerous takes. In the video over, instances of this are my arms dragging throughout the display, lassoing the video in as well as pointing to components. The more choices you have later on the easier of a time you'll have putting it together. Something specific to these types of video clips is additionally the value of the positioning of your tools/props. Be sure to keep in mind that if you wish to be able to reduce between two takes, as long as possible, items in the shot should not be disturbed as well as the video camera should additionally stagnate. Often times this is much easier said compared to done. Do your best and remember that at high speed, you have actually got more wiggle area compared to you would or else. Take Your Time If you've prepared points out, you must have the ability to focus on capturing in tiny items. Place components into bowl, mix components, draw bowl away, bring in another bowl. Each of these can be shot on their own with time between to intend your next action. If your plan is in area, you could leave the electronic camera shooting and then eliminated the voids as you relocate from action to tip later on (this can additionally be a huge help in preventing electronic camera movement). Enjoy Play around with different suggestions, get imaginative, a lot of times the little fun points that you include that have nothing to do with the real production of the dish are what could make your video stand apart. And Finally ... Errors Take Place In the video clip above, we got it excellent the very first time mixing with each other the Videosly Review, oil as well as vanilla. Would not it have actually been terrific if the electronic camera was taping. DOH! Hey, s ** t takes place as well as I ensure you it will certainly happen, so go into each shoot with the best purposes yet complete expectation that something might go wrong. For me, anticipating that something will certainly go wrong makes it a whole lot much easier to not obtain upset when it does.

The Editing and enhancing Refine When editing and enhancing fast setting up videos, you wish to keep it limited. The secret is to maintain something consistently involving your customer. Below are some ways to do that: Speed it up: Okay, you obtained that component already, however be discerning. My default is aiming at 150-200% for most of the video clip, yet ramping up to 600-2000% for areas where a great deal of blending or various other activity occurs. Throughout specifically long sections I'll cut large portions out, see below. Rough Cut: Assembled your timeline with every one of the Ins/Outs of each clips (the beginning as well as ending). This will certainly be truly long, yet you'll desire this as your structure to modify with, particularly if you're setting songs first. Rate AFTER THAT cut: When you accelerate a clip, you're basically getting rid of frameworks. If you're contending 24fps as well as speed that up 300%, you're only going to see 6 frames. Due to this, it is necessary to speed the video clip up very first and after that take the time improving the cuts. Otherwise you might wind up obtaining slightly different results than anticipated. You don't need to reveal whatever you filmed: When the video is flying by at 600-2000% you could cut out sections to reduce things up without anyone noticing. I do this a whole lot throughout lengthy blending sections where the initial fifty percent is important to see the blending begin, yet the last fifty percent does not change a lot. Every structure counts: Cut at the frame right before your hands/objects really leave the structure as well as reduced in the initial structure you see your hands/object returning to. It's amazing the result of just eliminating a handful of added frameworks can carry the smoothness. Struck 100% for impact: A really great impact can be falling to routine rate at specific minutes. I prefer to do this when getting bowls as well as drawing them out or bringing bowls back in. Decide on and see what works for you. Right here's what the final timeline for the example video above appeared like to offer you an idea of how it came together

So, why are these video clips so proficient at ORDERING people's interest? No Noise Essential A great deal of times we remain in a circumstance where we cannot (or shouldn't) hear sound as well as do not have any type of headphones. Whether you get on the bus, metro, in a waiting area, class, work, no matter. These kinds of Videosly Review let you appreciate them without sound because there's no dialog. All interaction is done visually, often with on-screen text instructions. Music could be a large part of the tone, however they can make it through without it. Attack Sized It's challenging to obtain individuals to buy a two, three, four plus minute video. 2 MINUTES! What!?!? Who has 2 minutes anymore. It seems insane, however with our need for every little thing on-demand, interest periods have actually obtained shorter as well as shorter. What individuals have actually been conditioned for nonetheless is seeing something for 30-60 seconds. Possibly you have actually seen a few of these little points we call commercials prior to. Anybody. any person. fine great. There's a factor they're all 15-60 secs. An Image deserves 1,000 Words Nothing proves that more than these fast-motion setting up video clips. You're not only combining a good quantity of info that would be included in the instructions, but you're giving your customer 24-30 pictures every second to reveal them precisely the best ways to do it. Effective. How? The just how is the component that I'm most delighted about. If you have a DSLR or mobile phone that was acquired within the last couple of years, you're a lot of the way there. Not just that, yet you do not need to worry about exactly what to claim, just how you'll appear, slipping up or how you look. It could be our little secret, however in the video clip above Jennifer as well as I remained in our jammies. Our Setup We've replaced the c-stand that you'll see in the arrangement photo listed below and also now we simply utilize our tripod that I state listed below. I such as the arrangement far better this way. It's cleaner, extra stable, uses much less equipment, no demand for sand bags etc. This is the setup that we'll be making use of progressing. I'm consisting of an image of the reverse angle with the tripod instead of the c-stand below.

How You Can Make Videos Play Much Faster on a Computer system

Computers use a wonderful means to see video clips, however rough playback as well as repeated buffering are an actual drag on the pleasure aspect. Nobody prefers to be disrupted in the middle of viewing something even if the innovation isn't up to the task. However before you invest the huge bucks on updating your hardware or replacing your whole computer, you can try a variety of easy and mainly totally free actions that must improve video rate and also integrity on your computer.

Step Close unnecessary tabs in your Internet web browser as well as other programs running on your computer system to liberate system RAM. Step Launch the Videosly Task Supervisor by keying "Job" on the Start Screen or pushing and holding "Ctrl," "Shift" and "Esc" on your key-board. In the Job Supervisor, check out the energetic processes as well as shut down any that you identify as excessive. Finishing procedures additionally decreases RAM use. Action Restart your device if it has been competing greater than a day. Operating systems are very complicated, as well as starting a fresh session can clear traffic jams that break down system efficiency.

Step Disable hardware acceleration if you're enjoying a Flash video clip. This could be specifically helpful if you have actually a computer made before 2010, or if you have trouble watching Flash video clips in full-screen mode. If you have no idea whether you're watching a Flash video clip or an additional kind, merely right-click on the real video during playback. If it's a Flash video, the Flash context menu will certainly pop up. Click "Settings." The Show Panel will certainly appear, and also from there uncheck the "Enable Hardware Velocity" alternative. Tips & Warnings If you're having problem with on the internet video clips particularly, see them utilizing a reduced resolution quality. A lot of video sites, consisting of YouTube, Dailymotion as well as several information video internet sites, permit you to readjust this setting. In YouTube, the "Settings" switch is in the bottom-right corner of the video. In Dailymotion, the "Resolution" button is at the top of the video clip. Reducing the quality of the video clip stream is among one of the most reputable ways making online video clips play much faster.

Why Does YouTube Maintain Stopping? Many YouTube video clips are published for the enjoyment of individuals all over the globe. Nevertheless, it is hard to enjoy the experience if the video clip maintains beginning and quiting. The longer the video, the a lot more information your computer system should download. It is normal for an on-line video clip to buffer just before it starts, yet it needs to not quit during playback unless you are seeing an exclusive video or have a Flash or data transfer issue.

Personal Video clips Some video clips are noted as exclusive and will certainly stop playing if you are out the uploader's Pals and Family members listing. Attempt viewing a different video clip to see if it is an isolated issue. If you are particular the video clip is public, your firewall software could be blocking YouTube. Attempt viewing it from a different network, if possible. If all else falls short, empty your web browser's cache and also clear the cookies before attempting once again. Go to "Tools," "Remove Surfing Background" and position a check by each choice other than "Preserve Faves Internet Site Information." Net Speed When videos do not play constantly, it is most likely because of a slow-moving Net link. Your Videosly should be quickly sufficient to download the video clip quicker than your computer plays it. If it is slow-moving, YouTube will keep quiting to buffer, or pre-download the video. At least 500 or more Kbps is recommended to stop this from taking place. In the meantime, you could stop briefly the video, providing the stream time to load.

Bandwidth Your transmission capacity is determined by your Net rate, and also it is the optimum quantity readily available for use. If you get on a network, the overall data transfer will certainly be shared amongst all computer systems linked to the network. If you are making use of any type of programs that make use of the Internet, they will certainly additionally gobble data transfer that might be utilized by YouTube. Do not make use of the Web till the YouTube video clip has actually totally filled. Flash All YouTube videos utilize the Adobe Flash Gamer. If you have problem with all of the video clips, install the latest version of the gamer. You may additionally see the complying with message: "You Had to Update Your Adobe Flash Player to Watch this Video clip." It is a great idea to uninstall previous versions of Flash, and also, if you are unsure, simply use Adobe's official uninstaller. If upgrading Flash does not fix the problem, disable your popup blocker from "Web Options," "Personal privacy.".

Readjust either end of the range to pick the beginning time as well as end time of the result.

Move the worth nob to the wanted speed:. You could quicken as well as slow down the video clip by an optimum value of 10 time the original speed. If you wish to make it slower move the nob to the left. If you want making it quicker move the nob to the right.

Select the smooth in/out alternative if you desire the video decrease as well as accelerate slowly over 1 2nd instead of instantaneously.

Preview the impact a number of times to see if you should raise the worth. If you are not satisfied with impact and also wish to eliminate it. Click the trash can symbol on the Rate Tab:.

You'll see that if you make your clip slower the general length of the clip will be much longer. If you speed up your clip the total length will be much shorter. When you pick the effect you wish to keep, readjust the rest of your story if needed.

Tags: Videosly, Videosly Review, Videosly Bonus, Videosly Discount, Videosly Reviews, Videosly Bonuses.

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No Need To Die Twice: Why I’ll Never Do Ketamine Again

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/happiness/no-need-to-die-twice-why-ill-never-do-ketamine-again/

No Need To Die Twice: Why I’ll Never Do Ketamine Again

WATCHING THE AMBULANCE PULL AWAY from the curbside, I entered the dark club and asked the bouncer what was happening. “Some guy passed out in the bathroom. Overdosed on Special K.” 

“What the fuck is ‘special K?’ Isn’t that a cereal?”

“It’s an animal tranquilizer. He took too much and went into a K-hole.”

The term ‘K-hole’ was the most frightening slang I’d ever heard for a drug experience. Recreational drugs are supposed to induce euphoria and enlightenment, not shove you down a black hole and force an ambulance to haul away your drooling hulk.

It was at that moment that I knew I would have to try Special K.

ON A BLACK RAINY DECEMBER NIGHT a year later, a twinkly-eyed, goatee-wearing young man stopped me at a party and told me he enjoyed my writing. As we began talking, I pegged him as a “Dr. Buzz” type—my label for a white male who compensates for possible social awkwardness by knowing everything there is to know about illegal drugs. He was with a nerdy friend I’ll dub Mr. Spectacles.

Dr. Buzz revealed that he was on a paid sabbatical from work and, to pass the time, he’d been shooting ketamine hydrochloride—the medical name for Special K—into his ass muscles daily for the past eleven nights. He said that after doing ketamine, the “real” world seemed boring. He seemed bright and well-adjusted enough that I began to trust him. Touting the drug’s glories, he and his bespectacled chum offered to share some K with my female companion and me. I still suffered from the impression that ketamine was merely a tranquilizer that would induce a heavily stoned “body high” rather than the most terrifying psycho-death trip of my life. He cautioned that since K impaired motor skills, it was not a social drug and we’d have to ditch the party and repair to his quiet lair on the city’s far fringes. He promised we’d be lucid after an hour or two and that he’d drive us home.

Foolishly, we agreed.

WHEN WE REACHED HIS SAD, FLAT HOME, the lights were off and a man was already there sitting in darkness, bathed in droning electronic music. When Dr. Buzz flicked on the lights, the man’s eyes were so glassy, he appeared retarded. He had reverted back to Apeman and looked at Dr. Buzz with faint recognition.

Dr. Buzz and Mr. Spectacles had already burned down some liquid ketamine into butter-colored powder for needlephobes such as me and my girl. He cut out three huge lines for us—enough to make a sandwich.

“That seems like a lot,” I protested, sitting on a couch.

“No,” he insisted, carefully drawing two syringefuls of liquid K from a vial with which to ass-spike himself and Mr. Spectacles. “That’s a normal dose. You’ll have to do that much to feel the full effect. You can do two lines, and she can do one.”

He told us to snort it but to avoid trying to swallow it as if it were cocaine—just crush the crystals in our noses using our fingers. He said that within ten seconds, we’d feel a warmth in our feet that would rise through our bodies.

After snuffling my two monster rails, I handed the bill and mirror to my girlfriend, who inhaled her portion. I closed my eyes for a second and then looked over at her. She appeared to be already dead.

BOOM! Almost instantly I felt warmth and a savage disorientation. I began to feel sucked inside a hurricane’s slow-motion roar. The floor dropped out beneath me. Everything was TOO BRIGHT AND TOO LOUD. Wow…wow…wow…somebody turn this music off and turn the goddamned lights off…it’s too much…it’s too much…too much…too much…oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. 

The one-level house suddenly had an upper and a lower level. It wasn’t a house anymore—it was a spaceship casino. A deafening strobe effect pounded my head as if I was tied to the bottom of a subway car as it screamed through the Bronx. Faster than I could blink, images and sounds flew by like neon shrapnel. I was being munched alive by a giant digital machine, a computer- screen wonderworld where my identity was pulverized and pasted into a cold, endless tapestry. Pieces of myself were chopped up and spat back with epileptic speed.

I was being smashed down and torn apart and fused with “the one” against my will. I was separated from myself and could observe my identity stolen and broadcast on the Jumbotron screen of existence. Even my voice had become digitized and sounded as if I was speaking into an electric fan.

A crushed pile of plastic chips. Utterly synthetic. Bland virtual-reality mazescapes, the triumph of math over feeling. Dead flat cybernetic soullessness. Mechanical insect brain. The only emotion left was the most primitive one—fear.

I was a biology-class frog, my brain severed from my spinal column, pinned down in a steel tray, unable to move or feel.

Suddenly all was quiet and eternal. All the colors were burned to ash. Cold, dark space and emotionless planets. A dull grey orb surrounded by hissing blackness. Many things are deader than we’d imagined.

Rearing my woozy head, I realized where I was. I just saw shadows of other humans. No one was stirring. The music had stopped and the lights were off. A James Brown bobble-head doll on the table next to me reflected the middle-of-the-night moon rays and radiated cold, sadistic, voodoo death.

I squeezed my girl. I hovered over her as she stood downtown in the city where I met her…I saw where she fit in my life’s thread, all the events that led up to meeting her and winding up here, lost in a K-hole. We both huddled against a blizzard of blackness.

She said she had to leave. She had to go. Had to get out of there. She stood up and I reached after her. Don’t go. As bad as it is here, it’s worse out there. She took two steps and collapsed on the floor.

I stood up. I looked down at my feet, which seemed to be only three or four inches below my chin. On the floor beneath me was the unconscious Mr. Spectacles with a Mongoloid grin.

I began vomiting. On the couch. On the floor. On the doorknob while walking outside. On the rock garden. Power-puking until all I could taste was my own stomach acids and the rank chemical ketamine taste. My eyes were watering, my foggy breath shallow.

My girl and I sat out in the carport in thirty-five-degree December rain for a half-hour, feeling no cold. Every time I opened my eyes to focus, I saw three of everything swirling around kaleidoscopically.

She finally managed to call a cab. Vomit rose in my throat the whole way. At a stop light, I opened the door and sprayed gut juice onto the asphalt.

“Don’t do Special K,” I mumbled to the driver as he pulled up to my building.”

I FELT A SPOOKY MALAISE for the next week. Everything seemed dead or in the process of dying. Cheap computer-generated TV ads and my rattling kitchen-stove fan threatened to suck me back down into the K-hole.

Researching ketamine on the Internet, I discovered that the recommended powder dose is a small “bump” rather than the twin peaks I inhaled. One study determined that users experience memory loss and “mild schizophrenia” for days after ingesting it. I also learned that Special K can induce seizures and cause severe brain damage in epileptics and left-handers.

I’m left-handed and mildly epileptic.

Thanks, Dr. Buzz.

KETAMINE WAS INVENTED IN 1962 as a safer alternative to PCP, the drug of bloodthirsty psycho legend. Its molecular structure is almost identical to that of its scarier older brother.

Ketamine was employed as an anesthetic during the Vietnam War and is still being used on house pets and children worldwide. Its painkilling properties are so powerful, it’s used in burn trauma and for post-amputation stump pain.

Along with PCP, DXM, and nitrous oxide, ketamine belongs to a class of drugs called “dissociatives,” so named because the user experiences a clear split between ego and body. Physicians refer to such a hallucinogenic near-death state as an “emergence reaction.”

Some people find the blotting out of self to be euphoric, an erasure of all self-consciousness; others, like me, find it nightmarish and run screaming back into themselves.

After media horror stories of its use as a “date-rape drug,” the Feds finally declared ketamine illegal in 1999. You can still buy it over the counter in Mexico, which is where Dr. Buzz procured his stash.

Ketamine’s most ardent spokesman was the neurophysiologist John Lilly who invented the isolation tank in the 1950s. The films Day of the Dolphin and Altered States are based on Lilly’s writings and experiences. Lilly is perhaps best known for his extensive studies trying to decipher dolphin communication patterns. What’s not as well-known is that he was a lifelong K addict rumored at one point to be injecting himself with ketamine once an hour twenty times daily for the better part of a year.

After enough time surfing the K-hole with dolphins (he never gave K to dolphins but claimed he once dosed one with acid), Lilly started believing that the gentle cetaceans were intermediary entities between humans and the space-alien agents of the “Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO).” In the 1970s, he went so far as to warn President Gerald Ford that the dolphins could save us from ECCO. Lilly once told a reporter:

Dolphins have personalities and are valuable people.…But what about their spiritual life? Can they get out of their bodies and travel?…I suspect that they’re all ready to talk and carry on with us if we are not so blind. So we open up pathways to them with ketamine, LSD, swimming with them, falling in love with them, and them falling in love with us. 

In short, John Lilly was insane, and ketamine probably played a role in his cognitive unspooling. He spent his life in and out of the funny farm.

Marcia Moore, a wealthy heiress and astrologer, was another ketamine cheerleader. She wrote a 1978 book called Journeys into the Bright World, which included this eager endorsement of falling down the K-hole:

If captains of industry, leaders of nations could partake of this love medicine the whole planet might be converted into the Garden Of Eden… 

On a frigid night early in 1979, Moore climbed into a tree, injected ketamine, dozed off, and froze to death.

The creepiest endorsement of ketamine, and the one which came closest to emulating my experience, is by David Woodard, described as a “requiem composer and a Dream Machine fabricator.” His essay “The Ketamine Necromance” includes this psychotic passage:

Although ketamine is a drug administered and experienced by living beings, the necromantic communications facilitated by its use tend to benefit the dead, offering their spirits a tantalizing portal through which they may experience the world of the warmblooded. Perhaps the dead are desperately clustering around an elusive window they have been chasing down for five or six thousand years of gnashing, burning, excruciating torment. Perhaps one of them would manage to claw his way into the ketamine user’s fleshy, nubile brain for a 56- minute respite. Such communication seems a match of spirits—at times fencing, at others playing mah-jongg or a game of decapitate the endless row of tractor drivers or amputate the handicapped. In a ketamine experience, you are likely to become a subatomic particle sniffing at the ominous butt of nuclear war, the pinnacle of NDE-driven necromantic glory and the greatest hope of all dead spirits that are not enjoying themselves. 

I SAW DR. BUZZ AT A CLUB about a month later, at a point when he’d been shooting Special K in his ass every night for seven straight weeks. He asked me if I wanted to do it again.

No more Ku Klux Ketamine for me.

Despite all the psychonautical jibberjabber about ketamine’s satori-inducing potential, or its application as a pharmaceutical biofeedback machine, or even its use in helping the dolphins save the Earth from ECCO, all it taught me is this:

I don’t want to die.

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Terri Schiavo And The State Of Exemption, Eric L. Santner.

Research recommends that Clinton's political election can enhance women's political power-but they'll encounter the very same risks as their male counterparts. You could be certain that you'll be feeling more positive at job this afternoon if you establish a new personal document in the health club this early morning. Like Oliver Sacks, who lugged a note pad everywhere, Lee constantly had a little 2 × 3 ″ pocketbook with him, which he full of every little thing from training routines to the contact number of his pupils (that included trainees like Chuck Norris as well as Steve McQueen) to rhymes, affirmations, and thoughtful representations. This deck lift PL-TG wheelchair handicap lift has some extra features to make certain the security of the individual of this lift. Alpha 5, a totally sentient automaton, or robot, is the devoted assistant to Zordon in the Power Chamber. When the Rangers lost their powers to Madtropolis, Web cam made use of the Scroll of Time to take a trip into the past and recover a source of power which might save them - the Samurai Amulet, a family members treasure in the ownership of his mommy. While there are many firms that make lift recliners - such as Med-Lift, NexIdea, Catnapper, Berkline, Franklin and La-z-boy - Pride Wheelchair and Golden Technologies have been around the lengthiest and have a few of the very best online reputations. However every specific exercise of power adds to power relationships all at once, as well as adjustment is unstoppable. Et put la maison, il est possible d'avoir chez soi un particular nombre d'accessoires d'entraînement employees tels que nattes et tapis de sol, haltères et fitness center weights pour poignets ou gym weights pour chevilles, cordes à sauter, hand hold, extenseurs, ballons de grand diamètre ... Bref, proclaim un toolbox qui vous accompagnera efficacement dans toutes vos bonnes résolutions! Denied by their classmates and also rather miserable, the women are conveniently guided when Mojo Jojo (voice of Roger L. Jackson), a superintelligent monkey in a turban, asks to assist him with a project to conserve the city. But also if you simply provide adequate power to supplement the power company, and even leave the grid for life, you are mosting likely to really feel a feeling of success. Defensively, power gamers will typically play as the catcher, edge infielder, or ideal field. http://szepkartya-blog.info/ misbehaved plan, these movie critics maintained, to delegate the future to real estate designers, job engineers, and a lot of public authorities, that seldom lifted their eyes from the issue right at hand. As you breathe out a second time, weigh down with your feet equally and also gradually raise more of your back from the floor. The announcement ends months of supposition that Engie intended to close the plant as component of a step away from coal-fire power. After revealing the Dino Gems, Tommy forms a brand-new group of Power Rangers to make use of a combination of Dinosaur DNA and Technology to eliminate versus the evil forces of Mesogog, as well as stop them from returning the Earth to the age of the Dinosaurs. One of the most wonderful and also crucial benefit of installing or taking care of residential hydraulic wheelchair lift is that this training machine does not call for electrical power to relocate or run. The person having loss of power need to take natural oil massage therapy to get solid erection as it aids to enhance circulation of blood to the organ to reclaim power and period normally. Power firms consistently move generation among plants and between business to successfully supply the power called for, as well as to satisfy contamination control needs cost-effectively. Pure Health club claims its company model is based upon using participants budget-friendly fees without linking them into repaired term agreements, with fitness centers available at any moment of night and day. Nonetheless, his as well as various other researchers' findings suggest that it is the helpless, not the powerful, who will certainly be most responsive to that message (individuals reduced in power record feeling compassion for others much more often). I ended up liking this a great deal greater than I anticipated to. For what is fundamentally a pretty played out idea (the Justice Organization with the serial numbers submitted off yet abrasive as well as dark as well as quote unquote practical), Straczynski truly toenails the psychological and moral intricacies. The Yellow as well as Red Rangers are still recouping from my last strike, and also I'm less than a lawn far from her. The ordinary fitness center subscription lasts 18 months, states the Health and fitness Market Association, yet there will certainly be many people that fall off the exercise bike long prior to that. A 132-pound woman needs to clean up 90 extra pounds at an intermediate level and also 150 at elite. Tumbling skills are usually a choosing aspect for class development in acrobatics. Powerbanks featured a USB cable television; you attach it to a power source such as a laptop computer to charge the powerbank. With power of all five Dino Gems, he makes use of the Shield of Victory to become the Triassic Ranger, as well as command the Mezodon Wanderer. This opens up Gaventa's suggestions of a brand-new means of assessing power relationships, called a third-dimensional technique, that recommends the miners and their neighbors aren't idly accepting their destiny and also gives some hope that, if they are ever able to strike at the origins of the power structure in their environment, there could be hope for significant change. It claims a lot that one of the endorsements that adorns the book jacket of Power is from one of Pfeffer's graduates. I call the little one Hans and the large one Franz since they view me in the fitness center, though I have actually never ever once seen either of them lift a weight. In the early 1990s, maker Haim Saban appealed the suggestion of acquiring up footage from the completely insane Japanese program Super Sentai, which adds the majority of the battle scenes in Power Rangers episodes to this day, and also shooting new tale" sequences with American-based stars. Affiliate Professor Ashton Patridge from the professors of design at Auckland University claimed off-the-grid, small neighborhoods" like Ta'u were preferably fit" to utilizing solar power. As soon as the door irised shut behind him, Andros observed that the various other Astro Rangers were standing there, awaiting him. Located 4,000 miles from the west coast of the United States, Ta'u has actually depended on over 100,000 gallons of diesel shipped in from the main island of Tutuila to endure, using it to power residences, federal government buildings as well as - crucially - water pumps. When an individual has power, either through political election or armed forces stroke of genius, their power exists in the capacity to physically persuade people right into doing just what they do not want to do. The necessary concept of a leader or ruler, with power, does not alter from federal government type to federal government kind. The brother or sister rivalry in between the two doesn't stop them from invoking plans to damage the Rangers. It comes as a research was published last week concluding that middle age currently begins at 60 Nuffield Wellness stated just under 10 percent of its 211,000 gym participants are aged over 65. In this storyline we not only satisfy the Waste Barret family (waste is the population that do not have any type of defense from a 'Family' a judgment power in this dystopian future and are generally not well off or well cared for) yet we additionally reach find out more regarding the Family members, the characteristics of the globe, as well as the past of Eve (also known as Permanently). LYNN: Aly has actually made a decision to go professional, which she is extremely excited around, but that suggests she won't be able to contend in acrobatics in university.. Mary McNary, one of Environment-friendly's consumers, informed The Province: It's intimidating entering into a fitness center setup. What they say: We are a group of runners that believe that gyms are a waste of power. Health clubs have generally taken our most familiar exercises, analyzed which muscular tissue teams are worked, what coordination is required, and afterwards created brand-new routines that tactically maximize impact and also effectiveness. Yet together they tipped the ranges at 755kg - more than 120kg above the maximum weight restriction in the lift at the Hilton hotel in Bath, Somerset. The 1,000-megawatt brownish coal-fired Loy Yang B power station gives approximately 17% of Victoria's power demands. The insurance claim that the Plan thrusts massive brand-new concerns on the states is based on the fiction that that the power field is a imperishable and or else steady industry. Holding a slab is one most reliable means to increase your endurance and endurance at the gym and in the bedroom. Super-setting by exercising on 2 or even more different pieces of equipment prevents others from utilizing them.

[uniteordie-usa]

It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 1 (Indoctrination)

http://uniteordie-usa.com/its-time-to-rethink-education-part-1-indoctrination/ http://uniteordie-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/We-dont-need-no-education-pink-floyd-the-wall.jpg It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 1 (Indoctrination) Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. – Mark Twain As a father of two young children, my thoughts have increasingly started to center around their young lives and the future world they’ll inhabit. Such considerations quickly lead to stressful questions such as, what are the best s...

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. – Mark Twain

As a father of two young children, my thoughts have increasingly started to center around their young lives and the future world they’ll inhabit. Such considerations quickly lead to stressful questions such as, what are the best schools in the area? Which option can provide the best environment in which to thrive? If the best options aren’t public, can we afford them? Is it worth the money? All these questions and more have filled the minds of my wife and I over the past couple of years, but lately we’ve started to ask even bigger questions; such as whether the compulsory education system as it exists in the U.S. in 2017 makes any sense in the first place. I’m increasingly starting to conclude that it doesn’t.

Before I get into that, let’s take a step back. A lot of what I do here at Liberty Blitzkrieg is highlight what’s perverse and destructive about human behavior at this time, and how things can be made dramatically better in the future. If I had to summarize my worldview concisely, I’d state that human beings at the moment are living under highly centralized, hierarchical power structures which are gamed by unethical, greedy and corrupt people at the top who exploit the masses ruthlessly.

Since the worst of humanity will always work hardest and most violently to attain power (this will always be the case), the only way to achieve lasting, positive change is to systemically move to a different model for human activity. Trying to get decent people at the top of a highly centralized power structure is counterproductive and merely a short-term solution if it can even be achieved in the first place. What we need to do is tear down and reduce centralized power as much as possible in the first place. If power becomes distributed far more widely across the planet, the ability for mass control and consolidation becomes much more difficult, if not impossible.

The most significant theme of the next hundred years (at least) will be a dramatic shift toward decentralized networks in nearly all aspects of human affairs. We’ve already seen its profound impact in a dramatic decentralization of information/media content creation and distribution, and we’re starting to see its impact when it comes to currency/monetary systems. Without the arrival and viral adoption of the internet, none of this would’ve been possible. More importantly, only 50% of the planet is currently online and massive social media networks have only been going for a decade or so. If we assume the internet isn’t going anywhere, we’re only in the very, very beginning stages of how it’ll ultimately shape human affairs.

As I noted in the recent post, Bitcoin, Terence McKenna and the Future of the Internet:

I remain in awe of the implications of people across the world easily talking to one another in real time and forming global networks. We’ve become so accustomed to social media at this point many of us already take for granted how extraordinary and revolutionary it really is. Nothing like this has ever happened before in human history, and it’s hard for me not to be extremely optimistic about its impact on life here on earth over a longer time horizon.

One of the most remarkable things about humans across the world talking to one another, is it becomes increasingly difficult to manipulate distinct populations into hating each other and rallying around wars that only benefit elite sociopaths in the first place.

As things stand now, people from all over the planet are examining the way the world functions and coming to the conclusion that it’s completely insane and anti-human. We live in a world where we’re told to be slaves to authority and expert judgement, despite the fact that such figures are consistently and spectacularly wrong, with their proclamations often leading to massive levels of death, destruction and economic collapse all over the world. To summarize, the world as it’s currently organized is transparently insane and cannot stand up to even the slightly degree of scrutiny. As more and more people wake up to this reality, the world will change in unimaginable ways. The earth as it stands today will be unrecognizable in 25 years.

Although I’ve discussed what this means when it comes to governing institutions and monetary systems frequently this year, one area that I’ve only begun to explore is education. As our kids creep toward the age where most children enter the school system, my wife and I have started to examine what this system looks like, and if it’s as insane as everything else about the world today. The answer seems to be, yes.

Earlier this year, I came across a 1990 speech given by famed teacher and author, John Taylor Gatto, and it completely and totally blew my mind. I highlight a few excerpts below, but cannot stress enough how important it is to read the entire thing. It’s one of the most powerful pieces of information I’ve ever shared.

Enjoy:

Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent – nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching – that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic – it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard…

Here is another curiosity to think about. The homeschooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents. Last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate” – that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this. But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic – because the community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead. The products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves…

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does…

I could name a few other conditions that school reform would have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television, or both. It’s a simple matter [of] arithmetic, between schooling and television all the time the children have is eaten away. That’s what has destroyed the American family, it is no longer a factor in the education of its own children. Television and schooling, in those things the fault must lie.

What can be done? First we need a ferocious national debate that doesn’t quit, day after day, year after year. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of homeschooling shows a different road to take that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into family education might kill two birds with one stone, repairing families as it repairs children.

Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn’t cost anything. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from the lofty command center made up of “experts”, a central elite of social engineers. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato’s republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before [our] eyes, our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn’t work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology – drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach…

Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer – these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of “school” open – to include family as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized that in 1976 when they effectively abandoned the system of adopting unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They didn’t succeed completely but they did succeed in reducing the number of unwanted Swedish children from 6000 in l976 to 15 in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not raised by their natural parents so they did something about it. We can, too.

Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents – and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 – we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief. I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests pre-emptying all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We’ve all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press – a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more “expert” opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their “solutions” are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I’ve said my piece. Thank you.

This above excerpts are from a speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990. Please read the entire thing and share it with the following link: Why Schools Don’t Educate.

Read More: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2017/12/13/its-time-to-rethink-education-part-1-indoctrination/