When you find your dream job

“It ain't much, but it's honest work”

lookit the blep!

Adulting advice: if you think you can’t do a thing because you tried it as a child or teenager and you sucked really badly: try it again.

You may not notice it, but as an adult you continue gaining motor skills, insight, problem solving skills and above all patience and resilience in the face of failure. Also puberty can be a nightmare. For some of us it’s just harder to do things when we’re full of insecurities, low impulse control and focus, heightened emotions, etc. A thing that was hard for 15 year old you might not be hard for 25 or 35 or 45 years old you.

I thought I was the absolute worst at sowing because I tried to learn it in my teenage years and failed spectacularly at the most basic tasks. Turns out I just didn’t have the patience and focus for it yet. I tried it again recently and it didn’t take long at all to learn how to make my own clothes. (And oh my, being able to make any outfit I want in any fabric is a queer superpower.)

It really sucks that we’re told quite early in life what our talents are and we end up assuming that there are some things we’re just not good at, when the truth is that learning as an adult is just completely different from learning as a child.

Oh man, since I’ve been like… 32+ ? So many things have gotten easier.

It’s not something anyone tells you. In fact, I think with our youth-obsessed culture, there’s a tendency to think that you’re going to peak young. Generally, this just isn’t true.

A lot of the improvement feels, like the OP says, kind of effortless. It’s me going back to cooking after not cooking for six years and suddenly, oops I’m pretty damn good at it. Why? I wasn’t cooking in the meantime, I wasn’t practicing. (I didn’t even have a stove.)

But other mental qualities were developing that make everything easier. My executive function, decision-making, motor skills, etc. are all better than they were, through completing thousands of other tasks. I can think, know, and focus better.

There’s a huge element of this, also, which is enabled by emotional capacity and maturity, which is even harder to describe. It’s easier for me to do things like tell the truth because I can actually understand the truth of how I feel and I am more likely to have the confidence to say it. It’s easier to make the right decisions, to weigh all the factors. Especially for me since I was really not consistently good at this in my teens and 20s (I was possibly more impulsive and risk-seeking than many people, but that just makes the contrast more apparent.)

The other thing to consider is that when you are a teen/child, you’re being taught things often in a very specific way that’s been determined by someone else. My dad, for example, wanted me to understand how engines worked, so he explained them to me while we both looked under the hood of his various cars or trucks. I learned absolutely zero things by doing this.

When I was 21, I decided I wanted to know, so I learned how engines worked from an educational website with animations and quizzes. And of course, I was able to learn it. It’s not that complicated. I was never unable to learn it, I was just not able to learn it that way.

YES.

And for the record: I don’t wanna shit on teens and young adults here or to discourage teens from trying complicated things. Everyone is different and not every teen is as much of a distracted and easily discouraged mess as I was. And as you say: a lot of why things are often harder for teens is because they’re not given the space to choose what they want to learn and how they want to learn.

Also, everyone at every age is allowed to make tons of bad decisions and mistakes and fail at tons of things or do things they enjoy without ever becoming good at it. 

it’s also why cycling through a lot of hobbies and interests is just fine in the long run. even if you don’t learn how to do anything well, you’re picking up plenty of foundational skills along the way. everything gets easier and more familiar the more experience you get at doing anything.

I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.

Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)

But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.

I couldn't even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I'm glad I stopped to read, because:

I was curious about their business model. They're a venture-capitol based tech startup, owned by Airbnb, the famous mental health professionals with a focus on ethical business practices./s They're also begging for donations despite having already been given 2.5 million dollars in research funding. (If you want a deep dive on why people throw crazy money at tech startups, see my other post here)

They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn't find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of "People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find". Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.

So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.

(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don't read if you're not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)

Their company summary reading as "AI Powered Community Moderation" really stood out to me, as at first glance it's not what they market themselves as. But after reading through the rest of the post, and seeing their list of 'customers' on their website it's obvious what's going on. The apparently unmoderated, highly dangerous chat service where they throw extremely vulnerable people (and presumably the people who want to take advantage of them) at each other in the name of 'mental health support' is not their product. Their product is a bot that crawls social media content to flag posts for moderation. The chat service is just a data harvesting ploy. They need a large body of example text of people experiencing mental health crises to train their bot on. The chat service lets them harvest that.

This company is selling a tool to help social media companies automatically detect at risk users and provide them with links to mental health services. Which sounds perfectly fine until you realise that it's building that tool in the most breathtakingly irresponsible and immoral way imaginable.

and I'm sure that the companies that use such a tool would use it to connect users to mental health services instead of flagging their posts as mature and shadow banning them to ensure that advertisers don't have ads on 'upsetting' content.

the bravest writers are the ones who make granny characters in scifi and fantasy solely for the sake of having grannies i think there needs to be more old ladies who Fight and Kill

not only because i like the concept of badass oldladies and the destruction of the concept that all girl characters have to be sexually appealing to the audience bc thats fucking annoying as shit, there is literally Nothing funnier than the concept of a granny with a massive sword or death laser. she pinches ur cheek lovingly and then saws someone in half. amazing

mad max fury road granny biker gang my beloved

Vuvalini!

Stop what you're doing!!!

Look:

Okay. Back to what you were doing.

blep!

tiktokers who say classic lit is bad because its not relatable 1. thats not the fucking point 2. you've clearly never read twelfth night as a trans bisexual

you've clearly never read Frankenstein as a student

If you're fucked up enough a lot of classic lit suddenly becomes uncomfortably relatable tbh.

Crime and Punishment was super relatable to me in twelfth grade.

Being nice to someone you don't like is not manipulation btw it's being civil

you know those posts where you see them and you know it's just a glimpse of the iceberg of discourse that the post is truly about

We have to destroy tiktok

For those who lack wood stoves or other alternative means of heating, techniques like this could save your life in winter power outages

Addendum to this: make sure you do this in a well-ventilated space or keep your windows cracked. Just enough to keep the airflow going.

I know that might seem counterintuitive to trying to stay warm, but it's better than getting carbon monoxide poisoning, which can occur if you burn candles in an enclosed space for too long. It can take several hours for a single candle to build up enough carbon monoxide in an enclosed room to cause health problems, but if you're burning more than one, as is suggested in the video, that time frame is much shorter.

Also, get yourself a battery-powered carbon monoxide alarm. They're cheap and they'll keep working once the power goes out.

self harm alternatives

I also paint my hands red when I really feel an urge to do this.

If you’ve ever been unfairly accused of waking up on the wrong side of the bed, you know already know how sleep affects our mental health. On any given night, we go through four stages of sleep and each one is a key player in how our brain functions the next day. A good night’s sleep improves our memory and allows us to efficiently process information. A bad night’s sleep can make us feel unmotivated and irritable. And while we all need sleep to improve our mood, not all of us can get it.

One look through history and pop culture tells us that sleep disorders like insomnia do not discriminate. Unsurprisingly, Edgar Allen Poe referred to sleep as little slices of death. Before Tupac was California dreaming, all three Geto Boys’ closed their eyes only to find their minds playing tricks on them. While Gucci Mane can’t sleep simply because he has too much to say.

This Self-care Sunday is all about getting the tools you need to go to bed with intention. Join this special Sleep 101 class and create a landscape of success for the week ahead. #Mosleeplessproblems

💆Self-Care Sundays💆 with Ruthie, Founder of The Rest, at 1:00 pm EST

About the class

If you want to get better sleep in 2022, you might need Sleep 101. In this session, we'll talk about what goes on when you sleep, how it works, and how you can use that knowledge to get better sleep. In the end, we'll have time for sleep practice (a guided nap), where you can use the techniques you learn in this class.

Meet Ruthie

Ruthie Nachmany is the founder of The Rest and a certified sleep coach. After sleeping ~4 hours a night for years, she finally realized how her lack of sleep was undermining her health and happiness while she was awake. As she started the journey of learning how to get better sleep and how important sleep was, she realized how many people also struggle with their sleep, and started teaching “sleep school’, where you can learn about the basics of how sleep works and what you should know about the science of sleep to improve the rest of your life.

P.S. Did you miss any classes this week? No worries! Check them out here and here.

LOL they turned off replies.  Anyway, not sure how I can talk about self-care if I can’t talk about the ADHD meds I take, or about the m ental i ll ne sses I also have. But hey, the post says a lot of words, so it’s all good, right? 

Big fan of the controversy over Lola Bunny’s Space Jam 2 design now that she no longer has tits becuase now the typical crowd that complains about desexualized designs are the ones that usually hate furries, and thus have locked themselves into a dilemma if they want Lola’s furry milkers to be the hill they want to die on to own the liberals

Even better, a large majority of people (including myself) just lowkey forgot what Lola looked like and only recalled that one iconic fanart. She never actually had bazongas in the original movie, so legally anyone who complains about the loss of her bouncy bunnies is undeniably a furry

this is both the best and worst way to find out there’s gonna be a space jam 2

This is the ONLY way to find out there’s gonna be a Space Jam 2

there is literally no piece of news about this movie that doesn’t read like a fever dream

the world is cgreat because you see a shape like this 

and uore like wow! animal :)

wow! animal :)

wow! aminal! :)

Fandom Trumps Hate Stall

Greetings, and welcome to Loud Cat Creations! I’ve been making jewelry for ten years, and I’ve been in fandom for twice that long. I love making wearable fannish creations for other fans! And what do I love more? Making fannish creations for a good cause. That good cause is Fandom Trumps Hate, an multi-fandom event raising money for a number of nonprofits, all of which serve populations who are particularly vulnerable under the Trump administration. These include GLSEN, Border Angels, and several organizations dedicated to keeping elections free and fair—the latter of which are crucial to protecting everyone in the US.

All of the necklaces in this “virtual stall” are inspired by Good Omens, and all will appear in my Etsy shop (http://etsy.com/shop/AVeryLoudCat) after this event ends. But if one catches your fancy, you’ll want to buy it here first because these retail from $25-$40 normally. For this auction, each is only $25. If you’re looking for a special gift for the Good Omens fan in your life or a treat for yourself, now is the best time to get one. :) Here’s how it works:

1.     Pick which necklace(s) you like.

2.     Donate to one of the charities FTH supports.

3.     Email me at monster.in.the.tardis@gmail.com with a screen shot proving that you’ve donated (redacting personal information is fine).

4.     Sit back, relax, and wait for your necklace—which will take about a week to ship.

Now, on to the pictures! There are several of these, so I’ve put them under a Read More cut.

Keep reading

Hi, all! This is my effort for Fandom Trumps Hate! Please look through the necklaces and donate if one or more catches your fancy :).

❤️❤️❤️❤️💕

@perfectly-balanced​ omfg

@silentfcknhill

I’m hat 5, broom 5. What about you? 🦇🖤🍂

Depending on my mood: I'm usually any one of the choices.

Today though?

I'm hat 14 and broom 20.

7 hat and 10 broom!

hat 10 and broom 4/14/15

Hat 2 and broom 9

@cloudyfish​

Hat 6 and broom 10 for me! Though I sometimes switch them up with hat 14 and broom 20 for variety.

@silentfcknhill​