Alacritous Living

I simply am in love with life and all it has to offer. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what I have to offer. Feel free to poke around my mind and ask me your burning questions. Also, let me know what you think of my writing and whether if it tickles your fancy. Enjoy! All original poems, writings and other works are owned by Kara under the Creative Commons License.

[allsortsoffuckedup]

Hey hey, as a librarian, can I just say don’t pace yourself at the library. I get a lot of customers saying “oh I shouldn’t get too many books out at once” but like you should!!!! Max out your card, take everything we have on a subject you’re interested in, make a book fort in your home. We love that shit! It doesn’t matter if you read them or not; just take them for an adventure and bring them back whenever they’re due!

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

Help your local library; get books out even if you know you can’t read them all!

[stevviefox]

Also, anything you remove from a shelf to look at to see if you want to read it or if you pull out a bunch to use for homework/research, please leave them on the table you’re sitting at. Some libraries have carts left around to put them on. These count towards usage statistics as well.

Also, don’t be shy about asking for help. This can be done online, too!

Many libraries have ‘lib-guides’, from “I like this author/kind of book, who should I read next” to a specific topic that is covered by books, online articles, and any number of related material the library may have (photographic collection, links to larger libraries or museums)

Also there’s usually some service that is related to what used to be known as inter-library loan. Basically, if your local library doesn’t have it, they might be able to borrow it from another library.

Always check to see if your nearest college/university/academic library is open to public browsing. You may not be able to borrow the item, but you can sit there and read it.

[alacritousliving]

I fucking love libraries

[ratfingerspress]

Inktober day 13 “drink”

[fozmeadows]

Watching my toddler figure out how to language is fascinating. Yesterday we were stumped when he kept insisting there was a “Lego winner” behind his bookshelf - it turned out to be a little Lego trophy cup. Not knowing the word for “trophy”, he’d extrapolated a word for “thing you can win”. And then, just now, he held up his empty milk container and said, “Mummy? It’s not rubbish. It’s allowed to be a bottle.” - meaning, effectively, “I want this. Don’t throw it away.” But to an adult ear, there’s something quite lovely about “it’s allowed to be a bottle,” as if we’re acknowledging that the object is entitled to keep its title even in the absence of the original function.

[legit-writing-tips]

Another good post to read for those writing small human characters. 

[jennytrout]

My son was about three when he came to me in the middle of the day and said, “Mommy, there’s a knight behind the bush.” I thought he meant a toy knight or something. So I follow him outside and he goes, “Listen. Do you hear it? It’s night behind the bush.” It was a cricket. A cricket was standing in the little patch of shade under the bush, chirping. So, my son saw this dark area with accompanying nighttime sounds and decided, okay, well, that is a night right there. Their brains are incredible.

[deleted20211121]

My little bean knows she’s two, constantly saying proudly ‘I’m two!’ And the other day she saw this very frail old lady who looked one foot in the grave, pulled a face and said ‘oh shiiiit. She’s three.’ I almost screamed.

[cantnotknope]

I live in Korea and have a lot of international friends, and the same is true with language barriers in adults. 

*Looking at a bowl of pears* “Can you please pass me the… apple’s friend?” 

[masterofbirds]

OH SHIT SHE’S THREE

[alacritousliving]

Boy do I love the kind of serendipitous errors that happen with language learning!!

[tinytuunbaq]

hms erebus: a woolie

please excuse any rigging and colour inaccuracies, i went off a moodboard of various sources for erebus's shapes and colours, as well as a layperson's eye for what i can only describe as many big ropes. there were so many ropes. i don't understand all the ropes.

sailors woolworks (or woolies) were embroidered tapestries that those at sea wove to pass the time and capture the likeness of their vessels. here's a good article if you're keen to read more about them. but the tl:dr; is that they showed ships broadside, full sail. in embroidery terms, the lack of dimensional detail makes them a surprisingly good project for a beginner!!

as i said to a pal, there's something that feels very beautiful and democratised about creating folk art now, in a time when we've put art, and access to it, on such an expensive and exclusionary pedestal.

[the-golden-vanity]

@ltwilliammowett

[hawkpartys]

one must imagine sisyphus posting millipedes to inaturalist

[alacritousliving]

Fuck yeah Sisyphus!

Although, it’s so unfortunate that he’ll never get any moss pics ☹️😏

[ultrafacts]

[icanread]

[goth-queen]

[alacritousliving]

Yeaaaaah this hits. We were meant to touch the grass and hew the wood and live/die within the same 15 mile radius.

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[evilwizard]

Dude. DUDE. HUMPTY DUMPTY JUST FELL. YOU NEED TO SEE THIS ALL THE KINGS MEN ARE THERE TRYING TO GET HIM BACK TOGETHER. THIS IS SO FUCKED DUDE. IM SO SCARED. HE'S DEAD

🖐️ stand aside. only the court necromancer can save him now. we must pray his body isn’t too broken…

[evilwizard]

WTF are the horses doing

[horse-is-a-horse-of-course]

i don't fucking know i tried my best but i think we made it worse with our big hooves

[evilwizard]

WHY WERE YOU INVOLVED AT ALL ??

[horse-is-a-horse-of-course]

i don't knowwww *kicks in frustration and hits humpty dumpty again* fuckkkkkkk

[evilwizard]

STOP

[alacritousliving]

I adore the unhinged ghost of a website

[heyyoufriendthere]

This new fish species is called Snuffleupagus. You can probably guess why | CBC Radio

S. snuffleupagus, a newly described species of fish, is named after the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus, to which it bear

SNUFFLEUPAGUS REAL

[brightnessrandom]

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

Hooray for science and hooray for S. snuffleupagus !

[alacritousliving]

Snuffy was always my fave Sesame Street character. I love this story! And so fun to get citizen scientists involved through iNaturalist too!

[suonko]

by Aliriza CAKIR

[myjetpack]

A recent New Scientist cartoon.

p.s. I will be in Madrid and Germany very soon! Details at www.tomgauld.com

[alacritousliving]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - I would have made an EXCELLENT Lady Naturalist. Just poking around in nature, making observations, sketching things out as best I can. Not necessarily *hardcore* science but softcore certainly 😅

[iamjaynaemarie]

Dangers of working on a set.

That’s what I said.

[seawitchkaraoke]

Okay but you forgot the best part! During the scene where Aragorn, Gandalf and the other Main CharaktersTM ride ahead to go shout at the gate (and talk to the mouth of sauron in the extended edition) they were very firmly told only to ride up  ahead “this far” because that area was cleared and beyond that it wasn’t.

But. Viggo Mortensen is absolutely mad and lead them just…. a bit farther than that. Everyone else was very scared they might blow up any second. Viggo said it “added a little extra tension”.

[mikkeneko]

[ithinkitsdashing]

#they just don’t make behind the scenes stories like lotr anymore

[ophidahlia]

Viggo was just Like That™ for the whole trilogy, taking method acting to extreme levels:

he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks

refused to use any prop swords that weren’t actual steel

basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible

often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended

repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off

had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming

the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained

carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported “a wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington

an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggo’s face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot

infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot

Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface

It’s probably more accurate to say that Aragorn played Viggo Mortensen in the off season, so I’m 100% unsurprised to hear he put a whole crowd of fellow actors in genuine mortal peril for a 12% increase in authenticity

[alacritousliving]

Just to emphasize, the LOTR Extended Edition special features are *THE* gold standard for movie extras. Idk if The Younger Generation™ knows what they’re losing out on there, when it comes to streaming vs. physical media.

[2birds1pencil]

a wise little fishy once said

[depsidase]

[depsidase]