Welcome to my Pile Of Stuff

studyblr: im-the-cookie-monster.tumblr.com || 21 || she/her || Desi || Bi || Feminist || Take your hate somewhere else || Header by @ssungods

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2023??

Cooking with flavor bootcamp (used what I learned in this a LOT this year)

Beekeeping 101

Learn Interior Design from the British Academy of Interior Design (free to audit course - just choose the free option when you register)

Video on learning to read music that actually helped me??

How to use and sew with a sewing machine

How to ride a bike (listen. some of us never learned, and that's okay.)

How to cornrow-braid hair (I have it on good authority that this video is a godsend for doing your baby niece's black hair)

Making mead at home (I actually did this last summer and it was SO good)

How to garden

Basics of snowboarding (proceed with caution)

How to draw for people who (think they) suck at art (I know this website looks like a 2003 monstrosity, but the tutorials are excellent)

Pixel art for beginners so you can make the next great indie game

Go (back) to school

Introduction to Astronomy (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Principals of Economics (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Introduction to philosophy (free college course)

Computer science basics (full-semester Harvard course free online)

Learn a language

Japanese for Dummies (link fix from 2022)

Ukrainian

Portuguese (Brazil)

American Sign Language (as somebody who works with Deaf people professionally, I also strongly advise you to read up on Deaf/HoH culture and history!)

Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified)

Quenya (LOTR fantasy elf language)

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2024??

Beginner-oriented video on how to sail

This guy has so many videos on baking different types of bread. SO very many.

Coding in Python - one of the most flexible and adaptable high-level programming languages out there - explained through projects making video games

Learn to swim! (for adult learners. I don’t care if you live in Kansas or Mali or wherever. LEARN TO SWIM.)

Learn how quantum mechanics works. Then read some more about it

[Learn about quantum mechanics again, but in a more advanced engineering/mathematics class. Then read more about the math and physics of it]

Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver

Something I learned this year: how to sew a quilt (Here’s a very easy beginning pattern that looks amazing and can be done with pre-cut fabric!)

How to hit the ball in softball

Tutorial video on what is under the hood of most (gas) cars + weird engine sounds and what they mean

Full beginner mechanics technical training, if you want to go more in depth

Playlist on how car engine physics work if you want to go ultra in depth

Lecture series on architecture design through study of buildings

How (American income) taxes & tax law work (choose “audit course” at checkout for free class)

Pickleball for beginners (so you can finally join your neighbor/friend/distant cousin who is always insisting you join their team)

+ Para-Pickleball for beginners (for mobility aid users!)

School is so much more fun when there’s no tests:

American Law - Contracts

Shakespeare’s Life and Plays

Fairy Tales: Meanings, Messages, and Morals

Modern Poetry

World History [Part 1, Part 2]

Learn a language:

Arabic + Resource Guide compiled from Reddit (includes info on different dialects)

Chinese (Cantonese) (audio)

Urdu (frequently recommended course on Reddit) + Resource Guide

Yucatec Maya

[pizzashowgirls]

Francisco Riolobos

[fennecshandgf]

sometimes i think about the golden record and i want to cry

[fennecshandgf]

there is a disk. it is 12 inches in diameter, it is made of copper, plated with gold. there is an inscription— "To the makers of music – all worlds, all times" on its surface. it lies on the space probe, Voyager 1, launched in 1977, to explore interstellar space beyond our solar system.

it contains human existence.

116 images— the sun, the location of our solar system, mathematical and physical unit definitions, and our planets, including a blue and swirling white sphere simply labelled "Home." it contains images of human dna, of our atoms, their structure, the way they divide, our anatomy, our conception, our birth.

it does not contain an image of war. nor of disease, nor poverty, nor crime, religion, or ideology.

it does contain a father looking lovingly at his daughter. it does contain the picture of a tree toad in a gentle hand, of a woman eating a grape at a supermarket.

the remainder of the disk is audio. a 90-minute selection of music from all over the world, sounds, and greetings. there are greetings in 55 different languages, one akkadian, spoken in sumer about six thousand years ago, and one wu, a modern chinese dialect. the greetings call out to a friend. it wishes them well. it asks them if they have eaten yet.

but it contains other sounds too. it holds the sound of rain, of thunder, of a volcano and an earthquake. it holds the sound of mud pots and trains. it holds the sound of a mother kissing her child.

with little to erode it in space, the golden record would probably outlast all human creation. it will be 40,000 years before it approaches another planetary system. if it does, it cannot find intelligent life. intelligent life will have to find it, retrieve it from where it floats silent and small through space. we still don't know if they would understand it.

in 7.5 billion years, the evolution of the sun would burn the earth up, and we would not exist any longer, but the voyager would fly on, bearing a memory.

bearing a disk with a little inscription etched by hand on its surface.

[st-jimmysidiot]

[susiephone]

the opening recording, by Kurt Waldheim:

"I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step."

[boycritter]

thinking about anastasia trusova paintings again

[boycritter]

CAN ANYONE HEAR ME

[pokichs]

I love it when the unreliable narrator begins to trip and reveal the flaws in their story and themself. I cannot explain how much I adore them. The moment you realize that "wait, something is not right" and start to rethink the whole book is the absolute best thing to happen to you while reading. You just know the reread will be even better.

[hyrude]

ao3′s orphaning option is cool and a good idea but mostly very fucking funny. i posted this work for fun when i was younger and i still want people to be able to come back to it if they liked it, but now im an adult professional and i dont want it attached to my name. whats the word for that? umm, anonymously posting? no. i want something that indicates i murdered this story’s parents 

[kyraneko]

technically the story’s parents faked their own death and disappeared to go have an office job, and that’s even funnier

[vyeoh]

[jamie-elbowz-deactivated2025092]

[fancygermancar]

”pdf file” “unalived” “grape” “corn” what if i killed myself right here right now

[fancygermancar]

imagine you read the local newspaper and in the section where they discuss a recent murder they describe it as “young adult unalived by serial game ender”. like you’re a toddler surrounded by adults who need to watch their language around you. you’re sanitizing and cutting down gruesome, horrific actions and situations into digestible baby words. i know this has been said before by other people but i’m so so sick of it dude, don’t speak advertiser language to me.

[amethystsoda]

[amethystsoda]

good work in the tags everyone

[lastvalyrian]

revivaldi

[shencomix]

[alivehouse]

everyone STOP having steady 9-5s and start being able to hang out with me at 2 am on a wednesday

[writingwithfolklore]

If it doesn’t impact the rest of the story, you didn’t raise the stakes

              I recently went back to a chapter at the midpoint of my novel and changed a huge detail of it because I thought it didn’t raise the stakes enough as it was. Because of this change, I had to go through every single scene and chapter beyond that point and edit it to fit in and make sense. It was annoying, but that’s how I knew I achieved what I wanted to.

              Raised stakes change everything about a story.

              If your characters can continue on as they were, then you didn’t really raise the stakes at all. This heightened pressure or danger has to be heightened enough that their lives as they know them are different now.

              Consider this: at the midpoint, you introduce a mutated form of a monster your characters have been facing that’s more deadly and intelligent than its predecessor. It’s a super scary scene, but after that, your characters go back to their safe house to talk over how best to kill it.

              Suddenly, this new monster doesn’t feel as much of a threat. It’s just another element of the same threat they’ve already been facing.

              To properly use this element as a way to raise the stakes, it should take away something the characters rely on—safety, allies, powers, etc. Something they can’t get back, and don’t get back for the rest of the story. They now have to adapt to new circumstances, and things will never be as easy for them again.

              So maybe instead, they flee to their safe house only to discover that it’s no longer safe—the monster is smart enough to get through their hidden entrance and corner them. Now they’re stuck out in the open, taking turns keeping watch and slowly deteriorating to sleeplessness and stress.

              That’s a delicious steak.

[author-a-holmes]

I fucking love you.

You may have just solved a huge problem that I've been stuck on how to fix for-bloody-ever.

Thank you for making this post. Just. Thank you.

To anyone else out there wondering if you should write up a post about something you've been busy solving in your own work, I encourage you to do so. You never know who might be struggling with the same probelm <3

[gridmaster5000-deactivated20241]

why is privacy so eroded. I get treated like a nutcase if I say no, I don't want strange companies taking pictures of my home and putting them online for maps or whatever. I don't want to be in the background of your tiktok, and I think it's weirder for you to assume I'm okay with it than it is for me to politely ask you to refilm it so my face isn't in the frame. I don't enjoy handing my employer a list of every online account I have and feeling under surveillance when I'm just shit posting or sharing pictures of my cats or garden harvest. I don't want to hear your private calls on speaker on the bus, esp when the person on the line doesn't know you're broadcasting their words to strangers. I don't want an algorithm guessing what will piss me off the most so I spend more time online, engaging with shit I don't want to see or hear out of outrage. I don't want any of this. it's total ass.

[howtodrawyourdragon]

So rumor has it that the Light Fury's design was solely based around the concept of "lady dragon." Apparently, so I've heard, the team behind her design didn't want her to look "too reptilian, like a lot of dragons."

So apparently, the Light Fury wasn't allowed to look like a dragon. She had to look female.

[komodo-kalia]

It's actually makes my stomach churn a bit to read what some of the men who created this film have to say about the Light Fury and the process of creating her.

They go on and on and on about how this dragon needs to be 'feminine' and the way to do that is to have her airbrushed smooth and devoid of any detail and graceful and elegant, because that's what being a woman is to them I guess. She couldn't have patterning because that kinda looked like scars and we can't have that! This dragon is POWERFUL and WILD but god forbid it even looks like she might have some scars.

She exists to be a sexy object for Toothless to lust after, and a vessel to create his children, nothing more, nothing less.

[ms-demeanor]

hey, don't cry. one cup heavy whipping cream, two tablespoons granulated sugar, three tablespoons cocoa powder and whisk until stiff peaks form for three ingredient chocolate mousse, okay?

[ms-demeanor]

i realized that i like the format because it's the exact opposite of the recipe blogs with 1000 words before they get to an ingredient list.

[cheeto-flavoured-pasta]

You will not use AI to get ideas for your story. You will lie on the floor and have wretched visions like god intended

[demaparbat-hp]

The Gaang (plus Uncle Iroh)