Tales of a Dreamer

Eliza the polyglot who lives in Scotland. Writer, Student, Actor, Insomniac.

[i-will-help-you-swim]

Reblog if you think asexuality is a legitimate sexuality.

I'm trying to prove something.

[cmoon-rabbit4-blog]

Reblog if your blog is a safe place for asexuals.

[elizavalentine]

Happy Re-hiatus!

I do this a lot, I know. I’m sorry. I’ve not been present on here, my lovely safe writing space, for so long, though I’ve been lurking around the internet doing other things for the last year-and-a-half. So, what’s new? Well, for a quick overview, I was finally able to go to Rosslyn chapel for real, I found a beautiful squishy little hamster called Waffles (she owns me now), and The Perpetual…

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[bundibird]

I dont really care if you use the term bisexual or pansexual, but what i DO care about is that you understand that bisexuality at NO stage in history was EVER trans-exclusionary. Bisexuality has always included trans folks, and non-binary folks, and the entire spectrum of gender between male and female, as well as Definitively Gender and agender. It has ALWAYS meant "attraction to more than one gender." It has NEVER meant "attraction to cis men and women only."

So, pan, bi, use whichever label you will. But do NOT buy into the recent-years innacurate concept that bisexuality is attraction to cis men and women only, because thats literally never been the case.

[maybuds]

the older i get, the more i need time & personal space to be as boring as possible

[archaeologicalnews]

Ancient Bronze Age city reemerges from Iraq river after extreme drought

When an extreme drought caused a 3,400-year-old city to reemerge from a reservoir on the Tigris River in northern Iraq, archaeologists raced to excavate it before the water returned.

The Bronze Age city, at an archaeological site called Kemune, is a relic of the Mittani Empire (also spelled Mitanni Empire), an ancient kingdom that ruled parts of northern Mesopotamia from around 1500 B.C. to 1350 B.C. Researchers have long known of the remains of the city, but they can only investigate them during droughts.

Archaeologists partly excavated Kemune in 2018 and discovered a lost palace with 22-foot-high (7 meters) walls and chambers decorated in painted murals, Live Science previously reported. This time, researchers mapped most of the city, including an industrial complex and a multistory storage facility that likely held goods from all over the region, according to a statement released by the University of Tübingen in Germany. Read more.

[unravelingthepages]

[z0mborb]

some of you may've heard about that fancy "bionic reading" typefont thats supposed to be easier for neurodivergent people to read (if you're unfamiliar, it bolds the first few letters of each word to make it easier to follow)

well guess what, its locked behind a $500 a month API to write in because fuck you!

introducing, Not Bionic Reading! it is literally just the bionic reading typefont but for free. god bless neocities

Tech bros are on another world just make a framework like the rest of us.

anyone who can, pls reblog!

[phantomrose96]

Adulthood is like I have to go buy more shampoo. I have to go buy more coffee grounds. I have to go buy more eggs. I have to go buy more toilet paper. I have to go buy more paper towels. I have to go buy more cumin. I have to clean the dishes so they can get dirty again. I have to do my laundry so it can get dirty again. I have to clean the bathroom so it can get dirty again. I have to buy more cleaner to clean the bathroom. I have to go buy more rice. I have to cook dinner. I have to cook dinner. I have to go buy more shampoo again.

[toastbutteregg]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[thelatinlibrarian-deactivated20]

Have a fantastic day you delightfully chaotic people :]

[amortizing]

third wheeling two girls who are best friends is so much worse than third wheeling a couple

[officialkendallroy]

yeah i will be eating pasta with pesto 3 times a week. i will be having pasta with other sauces too. i love pasta. can't have enough of it. slay

[beardedmrbean]

We got you buddy

[leatherleaves]

They just all swarm to save him…this is truly so beautiful

[passion-of-l0vers]

caramel frappe give me the strength to clean my room

[passion-of-l0vers]

caramel frappe PLEASE

[passion-of-l0vers]

#this art is so evocative. it feels like a goya painting 

thank you so much this is the highest compliment

[theworsethingsgettheharderifight]

Saturn Devouring His Caramel Frappe

[passion-of-l0vers]

oh i love this

[caimofnoceur]

17 free and helpful things, that everyone can take advantage of

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library They send an age appropriate book once a month if you have a child younger than 5.

Project Gutenberg Lots of free classic books.

Library Genesis A great place to look for and download college/university textbooks for free, as well as other books.

Scihub Endless Free college books. (and peer-reviewed scientific publications that are otherwise hidden behind a paywall)

Khan Academy Free knowledge that you can use to clep out of university courses, or to simply invest your time in a worthwhile topic.

Openlearn UK’s Open University - free courses for all levels of study, samples of university materials, study skills and tie-ins to BBC documentaries. Everything under Creative Commons licence so you can use it as you see fit.

Duolingo The Green Owl of Languages. There are a few hundred that it teaches and the mobile app makes it easy to do anywhere while waiting (!warning! only good for Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Esperanto, and English. with anything else it gets very low-quality and short.).

Codecademy An awesome site to learn how to use some programming languages. Doesn’t get into the really advanced stuff, but it’s good for a start.

Photopea Completely free Photoshop clone that has all the basic features of Photoshop, using basically the same interface.

Gimp Another free version of Photoshop.

Unsplash Stock of free photos of just about anything, provided by the photographers themselves, to do with what you like.

Futureme You can write letters to yourself (or other people) in the future! You can also make notifications and reminders of a +doctors appointments or anything else important.

Heavens Above You can look up all the satellites flying over your house tonight, including the ISS, Hubble Space Telescope, those pesky Starlink satellites, and whatever else your heart desires, complete with star maps and precise timing. And there is an Android app, but unfortunately no iOS one last I checked. (For iOS you can use “Sputnik!” which is free and tells, when ISS and Hubble passes overhead.)

Night Sky Other astronomy app for iOS. If you hold your phone to the sky the app tells you what you’re looking at (or point it at the ground for a view from the other side of the planet). Zoom in with two fingers and tons of deep space stuff is revealed.

Freecycle its literally people giving away stuff they don’t need/want any more that they can’t/don’t care enough to sell.

Nexus Mods Has thousands of video game mods (for 1,509 PC games), made by independent content creators, available to download at no cost.

Archive The Archive aka Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and so much more… For example a lot of DOS games (classics like Prince of Persia, Oregon Trail, DOOM, Monkey island, Rayman, Turtles), directly playable through the browser.

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

[therainstheyaredropping]

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

[hergan416]

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

[headspace-hotel]

Holy shit this post.