howdy

I draw sometimes 23, 🩷💛💙

[depsidase]

[do-not-u-dare]

Stole this from somewhere but i think it’s appropriate

[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)

[magnetothemagnificent]

So tired of the American culture around oral hygiene. You see it most in toothpaste or other similar dental products commercials. It's not "buy our toothpaste because it prevents painful infections", it's "be dentist ready" and ads showing people doing the "tissue test" to see how white their teeth are, as if the only reason you should practice good oral hygiene is because you're worried about the approval of others.

It's just...so harmful.

Oral hygiene is important, not because your teeth have to be perfectly white or because your dentist will judge you (they most likely won't), but because your mouth is part of your body and your health is important. The state of your mouth can impact the rest of your body, oral infections can become life-threating or impact your ability to properly eat or speak without pain. That's why you should care about oral hygiene- because it's your body and you deserve to live with as minimal pain and discomfort as possible- not because of some shallow beauty ideals.

I'm just so tired of the mainstream message of oral hygiene as being purely aesthetic. It's not. It's healthcare.

[rowanisawriter]

2026

DO THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM AT WORK. MAKE ART THAT HURTS. ABANDON ALL GUILT AND SHAME. DONT LET THEM KILL YOUR SOUL. BECOME YOUR OWN PERSONAL GOD. GROW SPIKES. DONT LET THEM KILL YOUR SOUL

[cats-napping]

”Anything you ask for, huh?”

(Click for higher resolution)

[cats-napping]

I think we might all be wrong about Jax (Chekhov’s Bowling Ball Theory)

I posted this on tiktok but I feel like I should post it here too. so I literally stumbled my way into this realization while having a bunch of unrelated thoughts about TADC, and it felt like a moment in those murder mystery movies where the detective is standing by the board and suddenly flashes back to that *one* clue that didn’t make any sense and suddenly it ALL makes sense.

lemme ask you something, did you notice in episode two that no one died or had any sort of concern of death? Ragatha gets stabbed through and gets a knife in the head, while Kinger takes like eight of them. then they drive off into a ravine, and Gangle (one of the more anxious characters) has absolutely no reaction to their possible demise. As for Jax, he stands on the truck as it falls much like a Looney Tune (keep that in mind). With this evidence I fully expect an episode in the future to reveal to Pomni that they can’t die (via her own death and respawn or another character’s, who she panics over before finding out they come back) with this reveal we would establish that the players won’t die while playing these levels, no matter the damage done to their bodies. Now I have two questions.

Why was Ragatha so afraid of the Abstracted Kaufmo if they would all just respawn? And HOW exactly does someone Abstract?

all we know for certain about Abstraction is that it’s the terrible thing that happens when you “reach your breaking point” your breaking point is vague, but what if it’s how exactly it sounds? What if unlike in the games and levels, the circus is a place where you don’t respawn (because as a “safe-place” in the game, that programming was never put there to begin with) so when your character for whatever reason dies (like if you were to “reach your breaking point” and end your life) your file corrupts and creates an Abstraction?

when they found Kaufmo they were surprised, and Zooble comments that they didn’t expect him to have “given up”. Implying that Abstraction to some degree is a choice. Like the only way to do it is to do purposeful harm to yourself while in the circus.

now, to finally get to my point.

who was the one to volunteer themself and others to go check on Kaufmo? Leading three of the five available people to find him, instead of sending more man-power to help Zooble, who arguably needed them a lot more?

it was Jax. Jax volunteered himself Ragatha and Pomni. He then proceeded to reveal he had a key to Kaufmo’s room, and successfully avoided explaining why. Then they opened Kaufmo’s door and found him Abstracted.

why did he (uncharacteristically) volunteer himself and the anxious new girl to check on him?

Well, what does Jax see on the floor and pick up? A bowling ball. HIS bowling ball.

why was his bowling ball in Kaufmo’s room? Why was that something that was added? What purpose did it serve?

and why did Kaufmo run after them? Why did he abandon Ragatha after she was down? Why did he abandon the search for Pomni after that too?

why did Jax dive into the gloink cave?

why did Jax make that expression at the end of episode two when Ragatha invites Pomni to Kaufmo’s funeral, before leaving completely with no sign of him anywhere at all during the actual funeral?

and lastly, lemme ask you how you think someone who behaves much like a Looney Tune, might kill someone indirectly to get away with it?

I think it will be revealed that Jax killed Kaufmo with a Looney Tunes’ style trap, one using that bowling ball.

Because why the hell else was it there.

[cats-napping]

this is pretty funny in retrospect ngl

[cats-napping]

drawn before and after watching 🙂

so how we all doing?

[cats-napping]

Got her done in time for episode 7!

[cats-napping]

like a sleeper agent

[trinketstar]

What's that 100 year old storybook about the girl who woke up in a world of living toys? It's got that cute but creepy vintage charm...

(Sorry i accidentally made an AU. Im gonna call it The Amazing Toy Circus circa 1924 or something.)

[cats-napping]

I want to inject this directly into my veins

[cats-napping]

[valtsv]

i LOVE the idea of "i can't win, but you can lose" in fictional confrontations it is SO fucking tasty. the human nature to self destruct and the human nature to survive by any means necessary combined at its finest.

[cats-napping]

not enough people are aware of this screenshot.

now you are

[cats-napping]

Grace and Carrie, just some good ‘ol god-fearing gals being pals

(My instagram and some other socials is @ cat_napsss but I forgot to save a copy with my tumblr @)

So I changed the original quote to “save our souls” instead of “spare my soul” because I get the vibe Grace and Carrie wouldn’t view it as being “spared” by the darkness but rather “saved” by it, both being given their power back over the other kinds of darkness in their lives

(And yes it’s gay they’re both sexually repressed good little christian girls what did you expect?)

The headcanon in my mind is that Grace met Carrie at their church and slowly starts to catch on to the abuse that’s happening to her over time. The rest— *cough* timeline *cough* —is in the air

(I have no idea how the quality is gonna look but hopefully it doesn’t get too crunchy 😭)

edit: cannot believe I’m only just now realizing that the pentagram is on the wrong side 🤦‍♀️ ah beans.

[largishcat]

there have been 774664 studies on basic income and the results of every single one have been “wow! we gave people money and literally everything improved! crime rates are down! the actual sky is bluer! my (the researcher’s) wife decided not to leave me after all!” but these have all been short studies, just a couple years. i think what’s really missing from the field is a proper long form study, with a broader, bolder demographic, to really get us those numbers we need. a truly diverse study pool like, say, everyone. forever

[cats-napping]

no because my sister chose the name Vivian because of this game and the dialogue change made her cry

[divorcedzukka]

characters whose philosophy is “if i cannot be wanted, i will be needed and if i cannot be needed, let me be used until there’s nothing left of me.” thank you for everyone’s attention. falls off stage and dies