Dancing Spirals

“your rent should be a third of your income” well wouldn’t that be nice. wouldn’t it. lower the rent pussy

Casual observation from someone old enough to remember: in the year 2000 financial advice was that rent should be no more than 1/4 of your income.

Until the mid 80s, the advice was that if you must rent instead of owning, then that 20% of your monthly income (oh yes, only 20%) should include all your utilities too.

After all, rent costs more than a mortgage, so it should offer more too.

The housing market is a fucking travesty.

Hmm what happened in the mid eighties....

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.

Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.

Wow.

You should really listen to the WHOLE thing because this woman does not mince words

even wilder is that adding a spouse onto your plan isn't like discounted or anything. it's not even twice what you were already paying. many times it's at least 3 times more expensive than each partner paying for their own insurance

when we say the medical insurance game is fucked, we mean on Every level

(What we have in mind for now are black dragons, with low density silver glitter, silver enamel, so that the pride flag pops)

I’m dying to know…

And before you @ me for calling these ‘cringe’… I made the ‘all these things that I’ve done’ for just me because I have, in fact, done all of these things

AND been criticized for doing all of these things 🤷‍♀️

It’s all just for fun babyyyy

Probably the music one for me, and is "gratuitous violence" cringe?

“I don’t care about dumb weed jokes,” I said naively, before I saw this

Lil Nas X did a cover of Jolene and Dolly Parton responded to it on twitter

Image descriptions under the cut

From Dolly’s insta:

I feel like it gets a bit lost, with how readily we meme his songs online, but Lil Nas X really does have a beautiful country singing voice. He might have the best voice for soulful, impassioned, male country vocals since Johnny Cash, and this cover really shows that off.

Pangur :}

I was inspired to paint Pangur so I could have the little goblin watch me sleep at night (or scream silently)

Photo reference from @pangur-and-grim

So true. It doesn’t have to be life or death. It has to be the stakes and how much you care. How much you’re emotionally invested. It could be the tiniest thing – she finally takes his hand – and your heart could break for them.

I feel like there’s a whole generation of creators that never watched the movie Apollo 13. It’s based on history, we know they survive.

It was the most stressful, suspenseful movie I’d seen in YEARS. I spent the whole movie going “OMG, are they going to make it?!!”

You don’t have to kill anyone to keep your show/movie “interesting”. You just need to be a good writer.

“Apollo 13″ is a great example because everyone who walked into the theater the day it opened already knew the ending. And you still get this enormous sense of relief when that first crackle comes over the radio. When Ed Harris sits down, you sink into your chair in relief.

Because the characters don’t know the ending. And we care about the characters. We’re experiencing what they’re experiencing vicariously, through them. That’s the catharsis of good storytelling. 

And the people who made the movie understood that and they were all good at their jobs.

You create tension by getting your audience to care about the characters (which, honestly, doesn’t take all that much, as humans can form an emotional attachment to a Roomba [literally] and will). Once your audience is invested, you can create tension a million ways. 

It’s entirely possible to tell a story with life and death stakes that’s full of tension, of course, but if you have to have life or death stakes or there won’t be any dramatic tension, you’re not doing your job as a storyteller. 

. 

Quoting @mierac for emphasis because this is it.

This response on Quora

need more women with swords giving me wisdom tbh

this week in I Am Very Smart: having enough money to go to the opera, museums and concerts correlates with having enough money for food, shelter and basic health needs

They controlled for socioeconomic factors though! The people who conducted this study knew that people with lots of money to attend the opera were also more likely to be able to afford basic necessities, so they controlled for it in their analysis. The fun thing about statistics is that you can control for different confounding factors so you can look at the effects of one independent variable (opera or whatever) on the dependent variable (mortality). Part of being critical of potential biases is actually reading the article and knowing what to look for.

In addition to that very good point about controlling for socioeconomic factors, the article says a single museum or concert per year makes a difference. Most cities have free community concerts (some even have free opera performances!) and museums that are either free, pay-what-you-want, or at least have specific days/times during which they are free or at a significantly reduced cost. Many libraries (which are free) provide free museum passes to card holders. In fact, the article quotes a museum worker who works at a free art museum in Baltimore.

If you actually read the article you would also read that educators are excited about this study because it provides evidence that the arts should be made more accessible financially - by restoring arts programs in the public schools, for example.

My dear @jamiebythesea I hope you don’t mind but your tags are important I don’t want them to disappear

Certified Check Out What Your Library Is Hosting Post

Important detail nobody is mentioning: This study only measured people aged 50 and up. Here is a link: https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l6377