(Para)dise

they should invent a being in your twenties in which you do not feel your life is unsalvageable and ruined

hope everyone in my phone is ok today. or surviving at least

Loser girls we will prevail

It's funny because none of you are actual losers, you're creative and unique, free thinking women and inherently worth more than any man on the planet.

I’m having a meltdown. When I was 9 years old I read an article in a magazine called Backyard Adventures about how this antelope, the saiga, was on the verge of extinction. I enlisted the help of my best friend and launched a fundraising campaign called Save the Saigas. We sold lemonade, had bake sales, sold belongings, yelled at strangers as they passed in their cars. Our parents were able to match the money we made. Our school helped. It wasn’t much, it didn’t save them, but it helped the organization at least a little bit.

Y’all. The saigas have been saved. A little piece of my passionate child heart that has seemed hopelessly lost and endlessly disappointed for a long time feels so soothed. Maybe it’s not all hopeless. Maybe our efforts aren’t a complete waste. Maybe we keep trying and actually hope for the best.

fucking hate it when the stuff everybody says "actually works" does actually work.

hate exercising and realizing i've let go of a lot of anxiety and anger because i've overturned my fight-or-flight response.

hate eating right and eating enough and eating 3 times a day and realizing i'm less anxious and i have more energy

hate journaling in my stupid notebook with my stupid bic ballpoint and realizing that i've actually started healing about something once i'm able to externalize it

hate forgiving myself hate complimenting myself more often hate treating myself with kindness hate taking a gratitude inventory hate having patience hate talking to myself gently

hate turning my little face up to the sun and taking deep breaths and looking at nature and grounding myself and realizing that i feel less burdened and more hopeful, more actually-here, that i am able to see the good sides of myself more clearly, that i am able to see not only how far i have to grow - but also how much growth i have already done & how much of my life i truly fill with light and laughter and love

horrible horrible horrible. hate it but i'm gonna do it tho

Sweet dreams

i am your microbiome and i will protect you.

“In an era of “girls-supporting-girls” and “let-people-enjoy-things”, having distinct tastes or opinions is tantamount to social suicide. There is no room for good-spirited teasing or critique or gossip or even interpersonal dislike. As much as I despise the phrase, these things are human nature. We possess the human range of emotions, which includes being annoyed or petty or mean-spirited—to pretend anyone is above it is not only moralistic but biologically false. When we don’t like someone or something, we scavenge to find a political or moral reason to critique them, instead of owning up to our honest truth: sometimes, you just find someone annoying.

Our crisis of niceness is both insufferable and detrimental to our artistic output; the films, art, and music we make are expected to promote pleasantness and punish everything else. We don’t see culture as a vehicle for artistic expression, but instead for moral expression, and as such our capacity for connoisseurship is at an all-time low. A film can be visually uninspired, a song can be derivative, a book can be poorly written, but as long as it espouses some rhetoric of universal justice it will be lauded as “important”. This is boring. It is uninspiring. If you even critique the mechanisms of the culture industry and its monopolized outputs (Marvel Movies, Taylor Swift, etc), you are deemed at best a hater and at worst a misogynist/racist/classist/homophobe depending on the day and the detractor.

It is a vague and meaningless form of pleasantry and niceness that does little more than create social codes of conduct concerning our language and discourse. It is Redbubble “Treat People With Kindness” stickers on MacBook Airs, it is a mass produced t-shirt with a slogan like You Matter <3 sold as mental health awareness. It feels suffocating, a cloying Yankee Candle atmosphere that gives nothing of substance yet demands a smile and a quiet wave.

We have confused pleasantness with kindness. Pleasantness is plasticine and sanitized, florescent lights over pastel bulletin boards. Kindness is human, old hardwood floors and fresh fruit.

Kindness is bringing your neighbors a bowl of chili, or sitting quietly with the people you love to reflect in the morning. Both actions somehow sparked mass outrage online and the individuals who shared their moments of quiet kindness were either called privileged or evil or any of the -ists that internet commentors love to toss around… classist, ableist, et cetera. The people who attempted to bring some joy into their own lives and the lives of others were called ugly and annoying in hundreds and thousands of replies within the same cultural space that insists that it is materially violent to say that you don’t like K-Pop or Taika Waititi.”

-meditations on meanness - charlie

One of the most life-changing things I ever learned came from Mythbusters, where they tested and proved (with cognitive testing puzzles and reaction time tests) that lying down and resting with the intention to sleep STILL provided significant mental benefits over just staying awake, even if a person couldn’t fall asleep in the amount of time they had. 

It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!

So if you didn’t know that…now you do

do you know that i think of this post every time i can’t sleep op. what mythbusters did for you, you have done for a great many others. 

I learned this from MythBusters too and it helped me the same!!

My random unsubstantiated hypothesis of the day: the popularity of "stim" videos, fidget toys, and other things like that is a warning sign that something's Deeply Wrong with our world.

Don't freak out. I am autistic. These things are not bad. However, can we just...take a second to notice how weird it is that there are entire social media accounts full of 10-second videos of things making crunching noises, people squishing slime in their hands, and objects clacking together, and that enjoying them is mainstream and normal?

It seems that nowadays, almost everyone exhibits sensory-seeking behavior, when just a decade ago, the idea of anyone having "sensory needs" was mostly obscure. It is a mainstream Thing to "crave" certain textures or repetitive sounds.

What's even weirder, is that it's not just that "stim" content is mainstream; the way everything on the internet is filmed seems to look more like "stim" content. TikToks frequently have a sensory-detail-oriented style that is highly unusual in older online content, honing in on the tactile, visual and auditory characteristics of whatever it's showing, whether that's an eye shadow palette or a cabin in a forest.

When an "influencer" markets their makeup brand, they film videos that almost...highlight that it's a physical substance that can be smudged and smeared around. Online models don't just wear clothes they're advertising, they run their hands over them and make the fabric swish and ripple.

I think this can be seen as a symptom of something wrong with the physical world we live in. I think that almost everyone is chronically understimulated.

Spending time alone in the forest has convinced me of this. The sensory world of a forest is not only much richer than any indoor environment, it is abundant with the sorts of sensations that people seem to "crave" chronically, and the more I've noticed and specifically focused on this, the more I've noticed that the "modern" human's surroundings are incredibly flat in what they offer to the senses.

First of all, forests are constantly permeated with a very soft wash of background noise that is now often absent in the indoor world. The sound of wind through trees has a physiological effect you can FEEL. It's always been a Thing that people are relaxed by white noise, which leads to us being put at ease by the ambient hum of air conditioning units, refrigerators and fans. But now, technology has become much more silent, and it's not at all out of place to hypothesize that environments without "ambient" white noise are detrimental to us.

Furthermore, a forest's ambience is full of rhythmic and melodic elements, whereas "indoor" sounds are often harsh, flat and irregular.

Secondly: the crunch. This is actually one of the most notably missing aspects of the indoor sensory world. Humans, when given access to crunchable things, will crunch them. And in a forest, crunchy things are everywhere. Bark, twigs and dry leaves have crisp and brittle qualities that only a few man-made objects have, and they are different with every type of plant and tree.

Most humans aren't in a lot of contact with things that are "destroyable" either, things you can toy with and tear to little bits in your hands. I think virtually everyone has restlessly torn up a scrap of paper or split a blade of grass with their thumbnail; it's a cliche. And since fidget toys in classrooms are becoming a subject of debate, I think it pays to remember that the vast majority of your ancestors learned everything they knew with a thousand "fidget toys" within arm's reach.

And there is of course mud, and clay, and dirt, and wet sand. I'm 100% serious, squishing mud and clay is vital to the human brain. Why do you think Play-Doh is such a staple elementary school toy. Why do you think mud is the universal cliche thing kids play in for fun. It's such a common "stim" category for a reason.

I could go on and on. It's insane how unstimulating most environments humans spend time in are. And this definitely contributes to ecological illiteracy, because people aren't prepared to comprehend how detailed the natural world is. There are dozens of species of fireflies in the United States, and thousands of species of moths. If you don't put herbicides on your lawn, there are likely at least 20 species of plant in a single square meter of it. I've counted at least 15 species of grass alone in my yard.

Would it be overreach to suggest that some vital perceptive abilities are just not fully developing in today's human? Like. I had to TEACH myself to be able, literally able, to perceive details of living things that were below a certain size, even though my eyes could detect those details, because I just wasn't accustomed to paying attention to things that small. I think something...happens when almost all the objects you interact with daily are human-made.

The people that think ADHD is caused by kids' brains being exposed to "too much stuff" by Electronic Devices...do not go outside, because spending a few minutes in a natural environment has more stimuli in it than a few hours of That Damn Phone.

A patch of tree bark the size of my phone's screen has more going on than my phone can display. When you start photographing lots of living organisms, you run into the strange and brain-shifting reality that your electronic device literally cannot create and store images big enough to show everything you, in real life, may notice about that organism.

There’s a combination of not enough stimuli and the fact that the stimuli that are around us are always competing with each other to be more demanding. In the real world you have a choice of what to pay attention to, but man made things want to grab your attention against your will so you’re always exhausted from constantly fighting for the right to decide where your attention goes and how long it stays there.

One theory I have to explain some odd choices made by translators (and my source for it is “it makes sense to me” so take it with a grain of salt) is basically that as human beings we share a common limit of linguistic complexity, so that languages that are simple on one level (like an alphabet with just a couple dozen letters) can afford to be more complex on some other level and conversely, a language with a more complex feature like thousands of ideograms or lots of grammatical cases will make things easier for itself in some other way.

A language like English which is quite simple in substance (easy conjugations, few verb tenses and moods, no need to remember the gender of every noun and modify adjectives and verbs accordingly, etc) can afford to be more complex in practise, for instance having a higher tolerance for implied meaning, ambiguity, syntactical flexibility, single-use neologisms, and so on. A language which is more complex on the sentence-making level (or word level, with non-intuitive spellings) will shun extra complications on the meaning-making level and demand more precise and codified phrasings, few neologisms, visible logical connectors, etc.

The example in my last post was really typical (though extreme enough to be funny)—where the English text said “the Haves vs. Have Nots vs. Have Mosts” the French translated the latter as “those who have more than all the others.” English went for ‘as concise as possible’ and French for ‘as clear as possible’. You could have said in French ‘ceux qui ont le plus’ (those who have the most) or even ‘les ayant-le-plus’ (the having-mosts) but the phrase with all the meaning out in the open was preferred. And although for specific examples you can argue that something else could have worked better, it still makes sense why each language made the choice it did when you consider the text in a holistic way.

A text translated from English to French gains complexity in some ways that are inevitable (e.g. verbs that are in preterit and indicative mood in English might have to alternate in French between imparfait and plus-que-parfait and indicative and subjunctive moods, with verbal structures that are longer or less straightforward) so the translator ends up lowering complexity on other levels, like choosing to spell out ideas more fully. It may seem like a small mental effort to deduce that “have-mosts” mean “those who have more than all others” but it quickly adds up when every sentence has vague or layered or innovative meanings. At the end of the day both the original text and the translation hit the same threshold of linguistic complexity, but the complexity is located in different aspects of language.

There are times when reading French -> English translations when you can see logical connectors being deleted for reasons that feel baffling to a French person (“it makes the structure of thinking less obvious? why would you do that”) but make sense if the complexity of the text has been lowered in some way that English speakers prefer (eg short, direct sentences instead of long meandering ones). Now that parsing the sentence and keeping track of clauses requires less effort, you can ask more effort of the reader by making meaning more implicit—and if the translator doesn’t readjust things in this way they’d be operating their language below capacity, and the English-speaking reader might feel like they’re getting bogged down in overexplained phrasings instead of walking at normal speed.

So in this light the wordiness of French makes sense for French and the pithiness of English makes sense for English—of course there are many factors at play but there’s one common motivation behind these opposite choices, and it’s balancing the different layers of complexity of each language (some of which are a matter of preference eg sentence length, while others are more hardwired) to try and situate your text at the level of complexity that is both hard enough to be interesting and easy enough to be comfortable for the human brain.

Stages of Decomposition, Embroidery by calicoranger

trying to understand what went wrong with taylor swift’s album midnights and realizing that what went wrong is the way i have viewed taylor swift all along. i may have rambled my way into understanding and enjoying the album, despite taylor swift’s best efforts to throw me off her scent.

Plants and books 📖🍀

where's that quote abt like. being embarrassed abt the thinness of ur life the way ur embarrassed by a threadbare piece of clothing. bc like yeah

Olivia Laing