beau @beau-and-arrow-99 - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Hi! Welcome to my blog! Here are my other blogs if you’re interested.

Good omens: (disclaimer: fuck neil gaiman 🖕🏻)

@forever-and-ever-omens

Steddie🎸☀️ (stranger things):

@cringe-culture-is-dead-99

Chemistry/ polymers/ environmentalism:🧪🥼⚛️

@polymerfan

‼️NEW‼️

Project Hail Mary: @rocky-and-adrians-horse

💫🪨🐴🪨💫

ahfolart-deactivated20250127

Megan Thee Fury

hellyeahrihannafenty

Tom Holland does Rihanna’s “Umbrella” on Lip Sync Battle

dr0wnedperfectionist

I’m literally zendaya reacting like he didn’t have to go that hard and yet..

kiera-jpg

if this comes up on my dash and i don’t reblog it - just assume im dead

claudiagray

The burning question: When she has her hands on either side of her face, right at the start, is this the moment she realized, “I’m gonna have to marry this guy” ?

victusinveritas

black-crested-jaybird

I always think of the description I saw years ago: Self-imposed deadlines don't help me, because I know the person who set them, and they're full of shit.

makingtrouble

Give yourself the treat before you start. I'm serious. And ideally during the task and afterwards too.

Executive dysfunction comes from a lack of available dopamine. Common advice is wrong. You need to provide your own dopamine before you can start. Otherwise you're trying to run your car on empty.

"But what if I still don't do it" well you already weren't getting it done anyway. Now you have a little treat. Try again later.

You deserve kindness and care even when you aren't being productive.

(Also read How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis)

twwings

I give my students a LOT of techniques for starting writing when it feels overwhelming or daunting, but one of them is exactly this: dopamine load BEFOREHAND. It may sound weird to people on tumblr dot com, but a lot of people seriously struggle with executive dysfunction when it comes to writing literally anything, to the extent that it can cause such symptoms as panic, depression, and AI chatbot use.

I usually suggest this technique as a "Reverse Pomodoro." In the original Pomodoro, you work for 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes (the times vary, but that's the essential ratio). People with executive dysfunction often find this insurmountable, and they get even more frustrated, and then the task seems even more difficult. So instead, flip those times.

FIRST, spend 25 minutes doing something energizing and engaging that you like to do. Not scrolling social media passively, not watching tv, not napping. Try something like colouring, doing yoga, running/walking around the block, talking about your favourite tv show with someone in real time, playing with the dog or cat, making and eating a lovely sandwich, hula hooping, something active. Having a little treat absolutely falls in this category!

(on the subject of little treats: refusing yourself food until you do work is for fucking Puritans and you can be kinder to yourself)

Then, after 25 minutes (or however long it takes to eat the sandwich or finish the yoga routine, it doesn't have to be exact), spend 5 minutes writing (or doing whatever you're struggling to start). Most people can coax themselves into doing something they find difficult for five minutes, if they have already filled up the joy/energy/engagement bucket. You can put a timer on for the 5 minutes if you want, or if you find that annoying, just work for as long as you like.

The other key is: don't push yourself to keep going when you're frustrated or tired—that will just reinforce the negative belief that you already have, which tells you that this task is painful to do, and needs to be avoided. If you've commonly had to force yourself to do this kind of task, that's likely part of why you think of it as painful and have trouble starting it now. Also, you should just, at a basic level, try not to put yourself in pain for the sake of productivity. So just do it till the good feelings run out. Then start hula hooping or colouring again for another 25 minutes. When the tank's refilled, try another 5 minutes of work, if you can. Adjust times to taste.

Not every technique works for everyone, but I've seen this one work for many students who are genuinely and seriously disabled by executive dysfunction. And many people find themselves getting more and more excited and engaged in the "difficult" task—because the good feelings from the hula hooping carry over, and because they're suddenly able to do the task without feeling pain, and feel accomplishment without feeling pain.

beau-and-arrow-99

Damn i wish i’d seen this when i was still in college 😭

headspace-hotel

I am learning to imagine the future:

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

I am learning to imagine the future. There is a crack in the wall of this prison, of this machine, of this darkness, and through it, I see a tree.

headspace-hotel

today

mr-deep-downer

sailatina3

herecomesthementalmeltdown

threeninesfine

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.

—J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

creatingblackcharacters

"From these made-up horrors, these fictionalized enemies, he had created a villain worthy of the violent bravado that he imagined he would display if confronted by said villain. This web of racist lies was what he needed to make himself seem like a man. He invented a story about bad guys who were out to get him, and he repeated it to himself and others until he believed it. Then he made up another story- of himself as hero, defending himself and his family against this violent threat- and he repeated that one until he believed it too. Brian wrote himself into his own American westen, a world of cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. And for a man with no job, few friends, and a family that couldn't stand him, pretending to be a main character in violent American mythology was as close to belonging as he was ever going to get."

Mediocre, Ijeoma Oluo

strangerconnection

you know, i don't remember

hellallamerican

a ton of people have unexpectedly followed me over the last 2 days so here is my rent-lowering gunshot:

the american south is the most racially diverse and poorest region of the united states, and any political sentiment that treats the south is stupid or expendable is inherently racist and classist. a lot of y'all are racist and classist. the south is also the heart of american culture. argue with a wall. you cannot deny that everybody in the entire world does not emulate artists from atlanta. there is vested interest in keeping the south poor and uneducated BECAUSE this is the most racially diverse region in this country. if you actually give a fuck about progress, you would fight for the south, not mock us.

beau-and-arrow-99

YES YES YES unironically i LOVE the south (except texas, sorry i have texas trauma :/ /hj)

I love my home!! We are NOT just a bunch of prejudiced, willingly ignorant people!!

Yes the south has a lot of dirty history, but thats just the united states for you. We have a beautiful, rich, and diverse culture !!

Culture of the Southern United States - Wikipedia

prokopetz

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

calloutnevvegas

For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

Don’t fuck with flamingos

revretch

….. Didn’t know most of that

iamthekaijuking

Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.

revretch

Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.

American flamingos just drink that shit

bogleech

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

assuming-dinosaur

Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.

is-the-post-reliable

requested by anonymous:

RATING: RELIABLE

Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.

Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’

They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.

Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’

They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.

Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’

The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.

Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.

“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’

The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.

It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.

Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’

Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.

Source: ‘Flamingos have very specialised diets. And their food is responsible for their famous pink colouration. The two species in Planet Earth II eat a lot of floating microscopic algae, which contains carotenoid pigments, the same types of chemical that make carrots orange. These pigments turn their feathers pink, orange and red – without them, flamingos would be white.’

adaginy

… @todaysbird ??

todaysbird

yeah they’re just like that

juney-blues

information that is also important

dailycatsblog

catboybiologist

#im going to commit an act of violence

soul-hammered

Hooray! Yay! Dykes!

headspace-hotel

I'm not seeing any naked adults in that screenshot...

...There's something deeply messed up about how breasts, which are used by our species to feed babies, are considered to be so perverse and obscene that a child should never see them.

alexseanchai

There aren't any naked people in the entire video clip. There's some people that you'd probably see less of their skin on a beach, but only because on a beach they'd probably be wearing a bikini top as well as whatever else they have on. And this is New York City, where toplessness is legal regardless of gender or assigned sex.

vergess

Toplessness for breasts is legal in most places in the US, unlegislated in almost all that remain, and only illegal in two states: Ohio and Tennessee.

This is because topless equality has been a basic push from feminists for literally decades, until Radfems and NeoCons bonded over wanting a trans genocide less than a decade ago.

It's literally why the "no tits on tumblr" and other lesser SESTA/FOSTA consequences* like it were so jarring. It set back FORTY. YEARS. OF PROGRESS in the rights of people with breasts or perceived as women to wear the same clothes as people without.

Do not let conservatives lie to you about this. The majority of people in the us and the VAST majority of States recognize the right of people to not wear a damn shirt. It isn't obscenity, it isn't even nudity, it's just something pericis men are allowed that everyone else isn't.

Y'know.

Basic sexual discrimination.

*Y'all aren't still on that "it was the Apple app store that caused the tit ban" shit, right? It was the literal US federal government. To be fucking clear.

beau-and-arrow-99

Reblogging bc i had no idea female toplessness was legal anywhere in the US! (Other than nude beaches)