IF YOU EVER NEED SOMETHING TO READ READ THIS

OK ARE YOU EVER IN NEED OF BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS BUT DON’T KNOW WHAT TO READ NEXT?

I present to you, straight from the internet, whichbook:

Here’s how it works: You click the link, and choose four categories and the extent to which these categories matter:

Then click “go” and it’ll come up with a number of books you might like.

DON’T LIKE THE CATEGORIES? NO PROBLEM - see this little thing:

THIS LITTLE THING WILL TAKE YOU TO THIS SLIGHTLY LARGER THING WHERE YOU CAN CHOOSE A BOOK BASED ON THE FOLLOWING:

YOU NOW HAVE NO EXCUSE TO NOT BE READING SOMETHING BECAUSE WHATEVER YOU WANT THIS SITE WILL COME UP WITH IT.

… Apart from bisexual retired alien dudes. No books on that. Yet.

You are beautiful person for sharing this with the world and I thank you.

Reblog to save a life

...okay, I’ve been trying to actively cut back on my reblogs, but this is fucking amazing.

Ontario residents go vote!!!

If you live in Ontario you know what this is. ^_^. Today we will be deciding if we want a wannabe-trump as our Premier (that’s Governor to Americans) and likely that will happen unless the NDP can come out in key ridings. So this is me breaking out of Sims hoping to catch one or two of you and remind you to vote. Or if you’re not of voting age, talk to others and learn more about what’s at stake. So please vote. Not for Doug Ford though. Toronto remembers Rob Ford… Don’t inflict his brother on the province. ^_^

Remembering those who lost their lives during the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting.

These are the victims of the MSD school shooting. Take a few minutes out of your day to read about them. They deserve to be remembered. 

Alyssa Alhadeff: 

Scott Beigel: 

Jaime Guttenberg:

Martin Duque: 

Nicholas Dworet:

Aaron Feis:

Chris Hixon:

Luke Hoyer:

Cara Loughran: 

Gina Montalto:

Joaquin Oliver:

Alex Schachter:

Carmen Schentrup:

Alaina Petty:

Meadow Pollack:

THANK YOU FOR THIS. This is completely tragic what happened to these students. We rarely ever see information like this. Thank you.

Fuck the NRA. Fuck any politicians who take blood money from the NRA.

Vote them out. The laws won’t change until we change out the lawmakers.

Hello writer friends!  I make stories happen with my face, how about you?

Who’s been here before? *raises both hands*

Can I press 5 for “all of the above”?

These bother me sometimes.

We all start as literal useless babies. No one gets a magic ticket that makes them better at anything. If someone says they “never practice” it’s probably because they like doing the skill and see it as a fun use of their time instead of “practice”.

I will qualify this a small but I think important amount, because what it is is actually complicated: 

Some people’s brains and nervous systems are wired for better hand-eye coordination. Some people’s brains and nervous systems are wired for better pattern recognition. Or translations of audio input. Or whatever. 

What this does is combine with @jelloapocalypse‘s EXTREMELY WELL-OBSERVED COMMENT (If someone says they “never practice” it’s probably because they like doing the skill and see it as a fun use of their time instead of “practice”.) in a way that can be both invisible and give this kind of person a massive leg up while being really discouraging to someone who doesn’t have that wiring. 

It doesn’t get to the actual original comic’s level of “oh I just started here”. But let’s take two people called Riley and Kennedy, and we’ll do singing, since that’s what I teach. 

Riley and Kennedy have exactly the same kind of background: parents who listen to the radio sometimes, the usual social stuff around popular music of whatever genre, etc, but no formal training. Neither of them sings in a church choir, neither of them falls into a formal disability category, whatever. 

The first time Riley shows up in my studio and we sing a really simple song I use as a diagnostic, she gets it mostly right. She can follow the tune; she can hear pitch, and it takes very little work for her to chivvy her voice into matching that pitch as long as there’s not something pulling her off. (In other words: as long as I’m singing the same notes as her and playing them on the piano, and as long a she can hear both herself and those notes). 

For Riley the lesson is really fun and validating and she goes home and sings along to her own music for a while and comes back next week with six songs she wants to try learning. And most of her lessons are like that: pretty easy positive feedback. That means Riley “practices” a lot in exactly the way @jelloapocalypse describes, even if she doesn’t think she’s actually practicing (that is, sitting down to sing the songs we’re working on together in a systematic way) at all. 

In contrast, the first time Kennedy comes to my studio, she struggles. It’s harder for her to hear the difference between notes, and it’s much harder for her to make her voice actually match the pitch she wants to sing at. When we pull out the diagnostic tune, she mostly manages to drone a few clusters of semi-tones, and while she can hear that she’s Off, it’s actually very hard for her to tell HOW she’s off, or what she should do to correct it. 

In most cases, for Kennedy, lessons - and in fact the overall experience of singing - is not fun. It’s not validating. It’s a whole process of Not Being Good, of Doing Things Wrong, and given the way humans are often in casual situations being laughed at. When Kennedy goes home she doesn’t sing along with any music she plays: she keeps her lips pressed together and at best enjoys other people singing (and maybe feels envious and demeaned because she can’t do it). 

Now the thing is, the practical “skill” difference for Riley and Kennedy here at the beginning is minimal. But the Rileys will tend (if they like what they’re doing) to ROCKET UP THE SKILL LEVEL, because of the “practice is fun so it’s just the thing I do” - because there is always a bunch of validation and positive reinforcement in the act of doing whatever it is, be it doodling or singing or math. 

The Kennedys won’t. In fact if they’re not lucky enough to have a good teacher, and one who can put a lot of this into perspective for them, they will tend to be inhibited. The worst time is when a Riley and a Kennedy are friends and sign up to learn together, and Riley takes off and Kennedy’s left sitting there feeling like she’s somehow Deeply Flawed. 

 And in fact the whole Doctrine of “It’s Just About How Hard You Work” will in and of itself become part of what inhibits them, because they will watch the Rileys - and even the Annas, Anna in this metaphor being the Totally Normal Student who never really exists - grasp things faster than they do, even if they ARE working hard. And this will HAPPEN. They will watch this reality happen in front of them … and then people say to them “oh, it’s all about how hard you work, dear.” And it’s like being gaslit. (Well, to be fair: it IS being gaslit, just without malice intended on the part of the people doing it.) 

And that message is horribly horribly toxic: here Kennedy is, and she IS working hard, but she’s still not progressing as fast as Riley or Anna no matter what she does! But it’s All About Hard Work, right? So that must mean that no matter how hard she THINKS she’s working, she’s actually just lazy, or doesn’t want it enough. It’s clearly a moral flaw in her. 

I actually have, personally, really good luck with teaching the Kennedys because I literally have this conversation with them when they come to my studio. I actually outright tell them: firstly, anyone who has working vocal chords can sing. Anyone who has working vocal chords and the ability to distinguish audio pitch can even sing on key in tune! But some people have an easy time learning this and some people have a hard time, and sometimes which it is has some relationship to, say, “early exposure to music” or whatever but sometimes it seems to be utterly fucking random - pure luck of the draw. 

You CAN SING. The capability is there. And if you want to we will find out how to make it happen. It might not happen as fast as for some other person, it might take more work, it might take more care, but that’s okay: that’s not your fault, that doesn’t mean you’re NOT working hard, but it does mean that here at the beginning we do things like recalibrate victories, we make your progress about YOU, not about Riley or Anna. 

But I’m also not going to gaslight you or make you feel like you’re either delusional or somehow especially So Terrible You Don’t Fit In The Rest Of The World: sure, I’ve got some Riley-types who walk in here, noodle around, and we go on to Art Songs. They exist. 

So what? Tall people exist. People with broad shoulders exist. People with dark hair exist. Physical embodiment and neurology hand out luck of the genetic roulette with no interest in outcomes. If you’re born blonde, it’s always going to take more work for you to have brown hair than someone born with brown hair, but much like dyeing your hair to match what you want, we can train the muscles of your voice and the neural pathways for hearing to do what you want. 

The differences between Rileys and Kennedys are very small. If Riley didn’t discover she liked singing and Kennedy worked at it for years then no, Riley would not “start out” as good as Kennedy is after those years. And you can be Riley and if you DON’T do the fucking work, the Annas of the world especially will blast past you and leave you in the dust. 

But on the other hand the Rileys get this wonderful cycle of positive reinforcement that does often start from a place of their coincidental physical embodiment giving them a slight leg up. And pretending that’s not the case does a big disservice to the Kennedys. 

We just absolutely do need to reframe that for what it is (a tiny fundamental difference and then a HELL OF A LOT OF “this is fun so I practice more so I get more validation so I -” and more or less no moral meaning at all), what it doesn’t mean, and how to compensate for it. 

People who grasp something faster also end up gaslit by this system. The idea that they must be faking or cheating because they don’t work as hard as other people at something is ingrained in them from day one when you spend all your days telling people that the only thing that matters is how hard you work.

Especially when kids are grouped into an activity by age and the people who find it easy are bored and don’t ever learn how to work at it properly, all the while being told that you’re only as good as the amount of work that you put in.

It’s why so many kids ID’d as gifted in elementary crash and burn when they get to AP programs or college: suddenly you get an opportunity to learn at a faster pace, but you’ve already been indoctrinated into thinking that either you’re not good enough if it’s not easy, or you have to study until you pass out to be any good. This on top of having zero idea how to study effectively and in most cases a lifetime of being told that you can’t actually talk about being gifted, finding a subject hard, or finding a subject easy. Because once you get ID’d as gifted, there’s always going to be at least one adult who decides that admitting you’re going faster than another student, or admitting that you might struggle despite being gifted, isn’t “fair” to the rest of the class. Incidentally, they’re the same ones fucking over the Kennedys, especially when they insist on saying things like “If you only worked harder you could catch up to Riley.” Which leaves Kennedy and Riley both resenting each other and also unwilling to ask for help.

^^ All of this.

....yeaaaaah, I’m rocking a solid thirty-three here.

And some of the ones that didn’t make that list have some serious asterisks next to them.

Also, besides the general theme of plants = YUCK, there is no rhyme or reason to the preferences of my taste buds.