Advanced Pain @gladimirlenin - Tumblr Blog

me: I really like history

what some ppl think I mean, and understandably so: eheheh I like military history

what I mean: people are and have always been fucking crazy and it's very entertaining to find out what they were up to. it's like drama but like three centuries old.

galina

I find these carrels with views over Bloomsbury completely irresistible. I had a really productive morning here looking through philosophy periodicals (and daydreaming about living in those terraces)

tempus-fugit-so-study

This blog just hit 200 followers, thank you all so much! The studyblr community is so kind and supportive, so I’m very glad that I joined! To show my thanks, I made some free daily planners.

The planners come in pink, purple, blue, green, and black & white, and you can access them here. Feel free to tag me or send me a pic if you use it!

nightlystudying

PART ONE - IPHONE

part two here

So this is my first post that isn’t a stupid text post or overly bright photo of my stationary, so I hope you’ll like it! It will consist of two parts, one for the ios apps and one for google chrome extensions. Feel free to send me recommendations!

bolded = favourite, cursive = apps I use every day

Note taking and co

Pocket - very useful app to save websites, articles, posts etc and read them offline.

Keynote, Pages, Numbers - basics if you have an apple device. I actually like keynote better than powerpoint c:

Notability - Very popular app and it really is worth its money. Great for note taking, especially in class!

Evernote - On my phone for over 4 years now. The group feature is so great and I use it for preparing posts

Werdsmith - very clean and minimalistic app for writing, I use it mainly for creative writing.

Microsoft One Note - Simple app for note taking and making online notebooks.

Languages

Leo - a great dictionary in 8 languages. If you log in you can save problem words and make vocabulary lists.

Memrise - My favourite app to learn languages for free. I’m learning Japanese with it!

Duolingo learning languages for free is always fun and duolingo is so easy to use, it’s even more fun! I use it to practice my Spanish.

Studying

Forest - Who doesn’t know and love forest yet? It’s such a cute application and I use it when I have a long study day/night ahead.

Brainscape - My to go app for flashcards. It has a giant library and it’s easy to make your own. Honestly, I’ve been using it for 3 years now and I still love it.

Mindly - A very beautiful app to make mind maps. I use it for story ideas and school work.

MindNode - also an easy way to make mind maps.

Uberchord - learn how to play the guitar for free c:

TheSimpleClub - videos, and tutorials of all important school subjects, mainly in German, I think

Notenapp - keep track of your grades - German

Khan Academy - like the simple club but with a broader spectrum and in English.

Tide - promodoro app with nice background sounds & inspirational quotes

Swifty - learn how to code in a very fun and simple way!

Flow timer - another great promodoro timer (they are everywhere). I like the minimalistic look and nice colours.

Inspiration & Motivation

Vantage - Simple but beautiful designed calendar

Calm - Helps me calm down with breathing exercises backgrounds and sounds.

Elevate - games and exercises that help to keep your mind fit

Pacifica - an app that helps with anxiety and mental disorders with a very kind community

TED Inspiring, interesting and motivating videos on a wide variety of topics.

Others

Textgrabber & Scanner Pro - Essentials. Scans photos and grabs texts of pdf and other documents and converts them into word/text documents.

Sleeptown - From the makers of forest a very cute app that helps you keep a healthy sleep schedule. I try to use it but I forget it often, sadly.

Tydlig - not free but honestly the best calculator you can have on your phone! Beautiful and simple it makes math so much more fun!

Spark - organizes your emails (even from multiple accounts) and notifies you if something important comes in. Very neat design.

Moon - cute app that shows the phases of the moon depending on the date.

Plant Nanny - keep track of your water intake by watering cute plants (they have something similar for walking and keeping track of expenses!)

luisstudies

i use a lot of these apps! they are good af💚

uso un montón de estas apps! son demasiado buenas💚

awaltzingmatilda

last year when my room at home was completely covered in post-its

tootickie

did i ever tell u guys that in fifth grade my class wrote a play bc we were studying ancient greece? it was called persephone and the (not so hot) heroes. i played demeter. basically, persephone got kidnapped by kronos and i strong armed hades into giving me 3 heroes from the underworld to get her back but they were actually terrible and i forget how she was actually saved but bottom line is that you wish you were my fifth grade class

tootickie

this wasn’t little either, we used the town hall and we wore togas and shit

tootickie

me as demeter

some lines (this was a joint effort of a bunch of greek-savvy 10/11 year olds):

athena: ‘im the goddess of wisdom but you don’t notice me telling everyone. i’m too smart for that’

aphrodite: is zeus chasing some mortal woman again?

athena: no this time he and hera have gone for marriage counselling

athena: we can ask hades to let them out of the underworld to help

aphrodite: he’ll never agree, he’s such a deadly bore (we made a fucking pun im so angry)

demeter: hades wont pick up. he’s too busy torturing the dead in tartarus

hades: i can’t undo the laws of death. just think of the paperwork.

aphrodite: the humidity is messing up my hair. it’s getting all frizzy

athena: is that all you care about?

aphrodite: no, it’s also messing up my dress

demeter: it’s so dark, and there aren’t any trees or flowers

hades: what do we need trees for, everybody’s dead

paris: yeah, and i can shoot straight! isn’t that right, achilles?

(hades enters)

paris: who are you? do we know you?

achilles: im mighty achilles

odysseus: im wily odysseus

paris: and im hungry paris

kronos: i really am awesome, aren’t i

aeton: one wrong move and you’re history

odysseus: fool! we already are history!

demeter: where are those mortals? i left them right there.

athena: are you sure? this isnt the first time you’ve lost someone.

why-try-whenyoucanhavecookies

I suddenly have the need for the entire screenplay, and to direct it at my college.

hobbitsetal

@teashoesandhair

teashoesandhair

These are funnier than literally any retelling I have ever done and I’m not even mad about it.

lesbianfreyja

the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” is actually not the full phrase it actually is “curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back” so don’t let anyone tell you not to be a curious little baby okay go and be interested in the world uwu

violet-nomad-deactivated2018120

See also:

Blood is thicker than water The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

Meaning that relationships formed by choice are stronger than those formed by birth.

espurr-roba

Let’s not forget that “Jack of all trades, master of none” ends with “But better than a master of one.”

It means that being equally good/average at everything is much better than being perfect at one thing and sucking at everything else. So don’t worry if you’re not perfect at something you do! Being okay is better!

theshantiestme11ophone

These made me feel better

thelifeofatubaplayer

Also, “great minds think alike” ends with “but fools rarely differ”

It goes to show that conformity isn’t always a good thing. And that just because more than one person has the same idea, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.

eattheacid

what the fuck why haven’t i heard the full version to any of these

terror-billie

“Birds of a feather flock together” ends with “until the cat comes.”

It’s actually a warning about fair-weather friends, not an assessment of how complementary people are.

engel-tier-deactivated20180213

I’ve always felt like these were cut down on purpose.

washington-acp

I really like these phrases and plan on spreading this knowledge.

alwayswillgraham

The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

its-kks-world

I want to make designs out of these.

sunderlorn

Funny how all the half-finished ones encourage uniformity and upholding the status-quo, while the complete proverbs encourage like…living exciting, eclectic lives driven by choice and personal passion.

tentaclabia-deactivated20190608

NICE

uhh-the-green-thing

The legendary thread is back

zwischenstadt

Political Economy 101

Heavily slanted to the U.S. I thought about adding sources/citations to this but I’ve had to read so much superstitious right wing barf that I should be allowed to be lazy too.

1. No country has ever attained a more advanced level of economic development via laissez faire policies.

2. Global economic growth would have been utterly stagnant since 1990s if not for China.

3. Some inflation is good. If inflation is less than 3%, it indicates a weak economy.

4. Money-based economic systems (metallic or fiat) have always been developed by highly centralized governments, never from the ground up.

5. A mature economy, if it has relatively open immigration and a middling economy, can expect to have 2% yearly growth, getting closer to 3% the better the economy gets. Less than 2% growth usually indicates either an incredibly shitty (like, crisis-level) economy or, as is very often the case in the poorer OECD countries, declining population. So when politicians tell you they’re going to great 4% or 6% growth rates they’re full of shit.

6. The U.S. population would be declining if it wasn’t for immigration.

7. Growth matters, but isn’t everything, and doesn’t by necessity indicate a rising quality of life. Even your average economist will tell you this.

8. Reagan was responsible for the Savings & Loan crisis, which wiped out nearly all growth created in the first term of his administration.

9. Clinton was culpable for the financial deregulation that led to the Great Recession, which wiped out much of the fragile economic gains that happened under his administration.

10. Given 7 & 8, neoliberalism has a dismal track record as a method of governing capitalist societies.

11. Capital is more mobile than labor, as it turns out, in an industrialized society. Adam Smith based his assumptions of capitalism’s benevolence on the idea that labor would always be more mobile than capital, and thus exert stronger competitive pressure on employers rather than from employers. He knew that if that wasn’t the case, then capitalism would have strong tendencies towards rentier-ism. Oops.

12. The U.S. has not experienced a tight labor market since the mid-1990s, which was a fleeting exception to the trend of lax, employer-slanted labor markets since 1979. We’ve gone so long without experiencing a seriously tight labor market that in popular culture, we have no meaningful popular memory of what one looks like. Common cyclical upticks in the labor market, like the one we’re in right now, would look pitiful in comparison to Golden Age capitalism.

13. The gender pay gap is real. It doesn’t express itself in comparisons between already-filled positions, but rather in hiring and promotion practices that are well-documented. Labor economists call this ‘pre-market’ discrimination.

14. Racist hiring practices are prevalent across the United States, also mainly expressed through ‘pre-market’ discrimination.

15. It’ll take a least a generation for ‘the robots to take the jobs,’ and the rate of job destruction will actually not be worse than our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. If jobs are destroyed and not replaced, or only replaced with shitty jobs, it’ll be because the U.S. neoliberal work arrangement sucks at increasing aggregate demand (paying people enough so that they actually boost the economy and new job creation).

16. The vast majority of private profits made off of low-wage work in the U.S. is subsidized by the U.S. government in the form of food stamps.

17. Oklahoma and Mississippi have standards of living that are about the same as the average of Mexico’s. Ditto for big chunks of most Southern and Appalachian states.

18. Immigrants can’t ‘take all the jobs.’ In a snowglobe economy, a person that works generates enough demand via consumption to employ at least one other person. This effect is actually increased in cities, mainly because of the thickening of social networks. If a section of the labor force seems to be causing wages to go down, it’s either a very temporary situation, or (as is extremely likely) it is being consciously perpetuated by employers to keep overall paid wages down.

19. Austrian economics (hardcore libertarianism) is held in such low esteem among economists that only one U.S. economics department specializes in it. There are more departments that specialize in marxian economics (a whopping 2), despite explicit ideological suppression. There are way more post-Keynesian (the leftier side of center-left) departments. The presence of Austrianism in academia is almost entirely subsidized by free Koch Brothers money, usually in Political Science departments, ironically. They tend to operate within hermetically-sealed “institutes.”

20. Mortgage-backed securities were a major instrument leading to the 2007 crash. Since the crash, they’ve rapidly begun to be replaced by rent-backed securities, and amazingly, patent-backed securities. Nothin’ changes.

21. Very few financial firms create wealth or facilitate productivity. Big whoop, we all know that. What’s interesting is that this is an openly-accepted axiom in finance culture. They’ll admit it to your face and in their classrooms. Only low-tier finance bros and politicians pretend that this isn’t the case.

22. The Founding Fathers had little concept of a free market society as we know it today. They assumed that the U.S. would be settled by large gentry estates. The surviving Founders in the early 1800s, including Jefferson, were horrified when Andrew Jackson abolished slow government apportion of land to this purpose.

23. Projecting free market principles onto Enlightenment thought is dumb for a simple reason: Economies were overwhelmingly dominated by local monopolies. People, including intellectuals, couldn’t even conceive of a society with nearly as much commodification or competition as exists in the U.S. today. From their perspective, the expansion of industry would create a nation of dispersed towns economically dominated by 1-2 families (which they thought would be awesome lol), mainly due to the techno-social dynamics of water mill power. Even the type of industrialization and socio-spatial dynamics that occurred in the 1800s was entirely beyond their imagination.

24. The skills gap is a myth. If one believes in a free labor market, then companies should take on the burdens of training new employees. When the most in-demand skills are easily teachable at relatively low cost (such as computer-related skills), employers are simply holding out for the government to take on training costs for them. Given the laxity of neoliberal U.S. labor markets, they can afford to hold out.

25. There aren’t ‘too many people in college.’ U.S. colleges take on training responsibilities which are less commonly taken on by universities in other OECD countries, where labor unions and technical schools take up the slack, in comparison. This isn’t bad or good, just different. Also, given the dysfunctionality of U.S. labor markets, most individuals are incentivized to credential up as a means for competing for a much-too-small pool of good jobs. People going to college are, overwhelmingly, acting rationally.

26. Supposed free-market economic development success stories aren’t free market based at all. Singapore’s government owns most of the country’s land, and a huge chunk of the country’s firms. Taiwan avoided a left-wing revolution by copying communist land redistribution policies, and it actually laid the groundwork for their success under capitalism.

27. Most scientific research (approximately 70%) around the world is publicly funded. There’s no sign that this will ever stop being the case.

28. The year you were born permanently affects your earnings. If you enter the labor market during a trough, employers, even after the economy recovers later on, will look down on you for having a ‘spottier’ work history during your prime years, compared to your younger peers who are just entering their prime working years. Economists who’s crunched the data have shown that the negative impact on your earnings will last throughout your entire life.

29. The U.S. Rustbelt is still the most manufacturing-centric region of the economy, and actually increased its share of national manufacturing output after the recession. This is because it retained most high-end industrial activity, while the lower-tier activity that moved to the U.S. South was utterly decimated by the 2000s wave of deindustrialization.

30 The 2000s wave of deindustrialization destroyed more jobs than the 1970s wave.

31. Most jobs created in the 1990s were created by Walmart. Yes, I mean that literally.

32. When Walmart began in the Ozarks, they justified their low wages by claiming that they didn’t need to pay their workers enough to eat, since Ozark women (their main employees) supposedly grew their own food.

33. After about 35 hours a week, weekly worker productivity sharply declines.

34. U.S. manufacturers have, historically, done very little to oppose increased imports and outsourcing. The AFL-CIO is the only major organization that has seriously pushed for an environmental externality tax or offshoring disincentives. The National Association of Manufacturers never has. This is because manufacturers like being able to move their capital abroad or cash out to private equity firms, or even simplify their operations by ‘hollowing’ them out. This is why Trump’s industrial policy, if he ever actually meant it, would fail.

35. Regionalization is at least as important of an economic trend as globalization. Quantitative economic geographers have found that since the 1980s, the ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ (purchased goods and capital) a regional economy are increasingly dispersed across different city-regions (i.e., some service or tangible good is increasingly likely to be made outside of your region, and what you make in your region is increasingly likely to be consumed outside of it). Interestingly, this also causes city-regions to become increasingly different from each other in economic structure, because city-regions continually specialize in specific industries as a result, or even specific sections of specific industries. This drastically flies in the face of common wisdom about how globalization is playing out.

36. Assigning a credit score to someone based on their history was an explicit attempt, spearheaded by JP Morgan, to inject Christian moralism into the Gilded Age economy. It’s one of the most important predecessors to the religious right, and is one of the reasons fundamentalist Christianity is so synergistic with modern capitalism: It provides a means to easily sort people.

zwischenstadt

37. While we’re all aware of the problems with monopolies and oligarchies, one of the capitalism’s entropic tendencies is towards monosophies- labor pools either being dominated by one firm or a group of firm that have agreed not to compete for labor. Monosophy is endemic to most U.S. rural areas and even many smaller U.S. city-regions, and is reinforced by tight relationships between local politicians and regional industries. However, monosophy even happens in advanced sectors of the economy. One notorious case is the labor non-compete agreements signed between the major Silicon Valley companies, such as Apple, IBM, and even Microsoft. They’ve agreed not to compete for labor, and by extension suppress the cost of labor. There’s a long-standing thesis in economic geography that even advanced city-region economies tend towards monosophy if there isn’t a countervailing social force either from government or civil society.

38. Lefties like to talk about Monopoly Capital, and although Lenin invented a fairly vague notion of monopoly capital which is actually fairly uncontroversial (the amount of firms grown in size, shrink in number over time), the interpretation of ‘monopoly capital’ elaborated by Baran & Sweezy (the Monthly Review school) didn’t bear out in the last quarter of the 20th century. Their theory assumed that Global North corporations would continually integrate new industries, new functions, and new spheres of control, becoming increasingly similar to a national government. Starting in the 1970s though, corporations figured out that it was easier to simply neglect major aspects of the industries they began in, break off chunks of themselves into new companies, and even force different sectors of themselves to compete with one another for what’s basically corporate grant money. Basically, neoliberal capitalist firms operate like a buffet line for investors, while marxists spent most of the 20th century assuming that the trend was towards ever-concentrated bureaucracy and minute control. It threw radical political economy off big time in the 1970s, to the point that even Ernest Mandel (otherwise a brilliant ML thinker) couldn’t understand what was happening. The Monthly Review school people basically admit that their progenitors were extremely wrong.

39. Not only did radicals fail to anticipate many aspects of neoliberal capitalism, but even capitalists and U.S. politicians, through the mid-1970s, assumed that the solution to the accumulation crises of that time lay in greater planning and more aggressive U.S. government industrial policy. This is actually where the Trilateral Commission of conspiracy theory lore comes from. It was an explicit attempt, spearheaded by the Rockefeller Family, to create a council that would coordinate business cycle governance between the U.S., Japan, and Germany. Never really got off the ground, obviously.

40. Benjamin Franklin’s letters on economics were a notable precursor to the Marxian labor theory of value and were cited by Marx in Kapital V1. Basically, Franklin went with Adam Smith & Ricardo’s idea of the LTV, but recognized that in order for the U.S. to develop, it had to acknowledge that there was what Marx called a ‘socially necessary labor time’ within a nation and that the labor process as a whole determined the value of a nation’s exports compared to another.

41. “Going Postal” as we know it arguable began in 1960s Detroit in the harshest, most racially hostile plants in the auto industry. Chrystler, at this time, was the nastiest and most union-hostile car company, and was already planning on moving its production facilities to the Detroit suburbs. They engaged in a process that was called N*****mation in the industry: Hiring a highly contingent Black labor force and working their Detroit plant overtime to build up capital stock to move their facilities to the suburbs (away from those very same Black workers). Worker-management relations were so hostile, that many Black workers kept guns to defend themselves from Pinkerton types, and there was a spate of workers pushed to the edge who killed their bosses. Given the politics of the era, it was often framed as violence inspired by the Black Power movement, but as these kinds of working conditions spread throughout the economy, it started being called ‘Going Postal.”

42. It’s important (very important) to be careful when advocating for infrastructure investment in the modern U.S. Reliable organizations such as U.S. Civil Engineer organizations (although they have their own biases) have made a convincing case that roads, bridges, rail lines, etc. are being left to deteriorate by austerity. However, some forms of infrastructure, such as freight rail lines, are entirely owned by private companies that are quite wealthy. Also, there’s the question of priority: Infrastructure is important for quality of life, not just economic productivity. What you’ll see in conversations about infrastructure, which I think the center-left and even the actual left will need to grapple with when fighting austerity is A) Many logistics companies are simply allowing their private infrastructure to decay to the point that the government is forced to intervene with public money even though they can and should cover the cost themselves B) There’s going to be a ton of bullshit regarding what needs to be invested and where.

43. It’s commonly discussed in business schools n’ suchnot that flexible production (building products across a globally dispersed supply chain, focusing on being able to get things around as quickly and efficiently as possible) originated in Japan. What’s less admitted-to is that it originated with the Japanese military in World World 2. After Japan would conquer a new nation or area, they would impose requirements that the indigenous firms in an area need to supply X amount of material. They didn’t care how it was done, whether with slave labor, or at what cost to people in that area. Very soon after World War 2 ended, Japanese companies returned, with U.S. blessing, to many of these countries and engaged in many of the same practices as they had during the war, mainly using political manipulation and soft power to get their way. In the 1970s, this form of abusing and ‘squeezing’ suppliers became commonplace across the Global North, as firms recognized the value in dominating and imposing fulfillment requirements on countries without needing to be much involved in governance or managing the labor force.

44. The pre-Trump tax corporate tax rate was not an impediment to growth or wage increases. There’s not way it could be. For starters, the theory that a company will always push extra money (for example, the extra from from the difference between a 20% and 30% tax rate) into productive capital and labor is highly naive. Given that corporations are closely controlled by investors, they may simply increase their dividend payments or buy more government bonds (usually to the same effect). The question of what they do is empirical- it needs to be confirmed or interpreted in light of how corporations are currently acting. Of course, we know these people are disgusting, coddled fucks but let’s pretend we don’t for a second. Given that U.S. corporations have persistently increased their profits in recent history and are generally cash-flush, the naive theory already seems incredibly doubtful. They’ve got money, and they’re sitting on it. Give them more money, they’ll just keep sitting on it. Also, when corporations, again as an increasing trend, do get cash injections, they tend to simply buy more of their own stock.

45. Private investment in productive capital and labor training has persistently declined since the late 1970s (along with public investment, of course). In mainstream economics, the reason for this is considered a mystery. Among social scientists who study finance capital and corporate governance, it’s generally agreed that there has been an ever-thickening preference from the bourgeoisie for rentier income (landlording, bondholding, securities trading etc.) rather than productive entrepreneurship.

46. The stock market is drastically less important to the economy than bond markets (especially government bond markets), commodities trading, and non-traded pensions. The only reason the stock market is so reified in the capitalist imagination is that, once-in-while, it offers fast profits to very few individuals. It’s the finance sector equivalent of watching Monday night football.

herhighnessthequeen

Hoe Tips: School and Studying

I’m currently in PA school with close to a 4.0 GPA, and with college and back to school starting up, I’m dropping some tips for y'all. A hoe gotta get bomb ass grades if ya want a bomb ass career and to be successful af. So let’s get it✨

1. Write out your notes. Have two notebooks: one for when you’re in class (this one can be messy) and one for at home (this one is the neater one, for color coding, formatting, and all that organizational jazz). Writing things out is proven to enhance memorization 7X more than just reading is.

2. Have a go-to format for your notes. Numbering, bullet points, whatever floats your boat.

3. Type out your notes. I use Google Drive, because it automatically saves all your shit, and you can access your notes via your Google account literally anywhere. Typing out your notes does the same thing writing them out does, as far as helping you review the material.

4. Use Quizlet. Quizlet is a free flashcard website/app that allows you to type in all of your flashcards and definitions, and gives you review options like matching, testing, flashcard mode, and more. This shit made me my high schools valedictorian, no lie.

5. Keep your old quizzes and tests. Often times, teachers will ask similar questions on finals.

6. For math-based subjects, always always always show your work in your notes. I try to explain each step for a math problem in the margins of my notes, and generalize how to do each problem at the end.

7. Do practice problems consistently.

8. For my college hoes: never take an 8 am class. You think you can do it because you did it for high school, but I promise you will regret it. If there’s no avoiding the 8 am lecture, bring coffee and skip any makeup/hair that day. Sleep is too important.

9. Make flashcards. The night before my exams, I like to try and fit everything I need to know for a specific chapter/topic onto one flashcard, in order to weed out main ideas.

10. For essays, easybib.com is amazing with free citations to avoid any plaigiarism or incorrect bibliographies.

11. Rent👏your👏textbooks👏. Unless your teacher specifically requires you BUY it, you likely won’t need the actual textbook. Buying access codes for the book online is hundreds of dollars cheaper.

12. If you do get your textbooks, a lot of them have chapter summaries at the end of each chapter. Be sure to write out/type out/review those summaries.

13. For science labs, if you are allowed, take pictures of any models or slides you need to know for your exams. Pretty much all labs won’t let you take pictures of cadavers or animal dissections, but plastic models and microscope slides should be fine.

14. If you have a question, ASK YOUR TEACHER. It is better to look stupid in class and get your clarification, than to look stupid when you get your exam back and actually have it count against your grade.

15. Do study groups. I have two nursing friends in some of the same classes as me, and we’d always meet up before exams to go over the material. We would bring dry erase markers and map out shit in empty classrooms, taking turns explaining shit to each other until we nailed it.

16. Try to teach the material. Like I said in #15, study groups are great for this. By teaching the material out loud, you are subconsciously reviewing it yourself. This is a HUGE help.

17. Take breaks. You cannot exhaust yourself and expect to still recall anything you learned.

18. I know everyone does this and there’s no avoiding it sometimes, but DO NOT CRAM. Gradual learning is most effective.

19. Have one day every week where you don’t do any schoolwork. You need time to reboot.

20. Use your phone’s calendar/task checklist app for all major assignments, due dates, exam dates, study plans, appointments, etc. Set reminders as needed.

21. Charge your phone in another room while studying. No distractions.

22. Rainymood.com is a free website that plays a 30 minute loop of rain sounds. It helps me focus like nothing else, especially in my loud ass household, and every time the loop stops and replays, I know to take a break between 30 minute study sessions.

23. Feel distracted at home when studying? Try studying in a library, cafe, or even at school. I find that going somewhere else to study actually forces me to pay attention to what I’m doing, for some reason.

24. Reward yourself for good grades. Buy yourself a slice of pizza or a new highlight, have a netflix marathon, go to a party, or take a nap. Whatever conveys a job well done, do it. It’ll make all that studying feel that much greater when it’s over, and you’ll have a goal to work towards.

25. Sit in the front of the classroom as often as possible. You’ll be forced to pay attention, be able to actually see the board, hear the instructor better, and you’re more likely to have your questions answered quickly because your teacher will actually see your hand go up.

26. Caffeinate. I prefer tea because it’s healthier, but coffee works too. Ya girl is NOT a morning person, but my morning tea at least helps me pay attention during earlier classes.

27. Keep all of your school shit organized, together, and labelled.

28. Do NOT skip a class just because you’re lazy or don’t feel like going. The temptation is real sometimes, but a hoes gonna be pissed when ya see your participation average decline.

29. This may just be a psychological thing, but I love to use the same colored/brand of pen for all of my notes/assignments/tests. It just makes everything seem more uniform, and I’m able to recall information better.

30. Trouble taking tests? For any multiple choice question, read the question and try to answer it first without reading any of the options. If your answer doesn’t match the options, then use process of elimination to find the best answer. For true/false questions, write out justifications for each answer (you can also do this for multiple choice). You’ll be acing your exams in no time.

31. Chewing gum during class/studying, and chewing that same flavor gum during the exam, has been scientifically proven to boost your memory recall.

32. Literally any time you have the opportunity to do extra credit, DO IT. Cherish that shit.

33. If you aren’t doing so hot in a particular class (literally any math class for me lol), schedule a private meeting with your professor and go over test questions you missed, or topics you didn’t get. If you know your professor is a flop, or can’t get an appointment, meet with a tutor or another professor of that same subject. Sometimes another voice can shed new light on a difficult topic.

34. For essays, readable.io critiques your writing for free based on readability, grade level, formality, tone, grammatical errors, etc. Seriously a life saver.

35. Also thesaurus.com is ya bff for fancier words/phrases to make your writing more eloquent

36. Always make an outline for every essay or project to organize what you want to say. This will keep you on track, and help you work around any quotes or sources in you writing to make sure your writing is hella organized.

That’s all I can think of for now, please please please feel free to add and share. Enjoy those 4.0’s, hoes💞

startingbullet

[ 10/3/17 ] 🎃 Happy October! Today is my mom’s birthday. I wish I could do something for her, but I’m 6 hours away at school.

secundastudies

9/30/17

October’s almost here! We’re starting the Metamorphosis in National English Honors Society and I just happened to buy a copy over the summer 😂

caesarstudies

writing an essay in college is very different from writing an essay in high school. personally, i write more research/history papers than literary essays (the liberal arts life and curse), so this is going to be a post on how a general research-y essay that has a thesis and arguments.

intro

don’t open with a quote and don’t be overly broad.

avoid generalizations

your intro should address the topic of your essay (ex. the significance of gardens in renaissance society), and then narrow down to what you want to talk about in regards to your topic (ex. the political influence of the Medici gardens during the renaissance)

thesis! it should include the argument you want to make about the narrowed down topic, and three (or however many your class requires) reasons to support it. I like to think of it as W = X + Y + Z.

your thesis explains who, what and why in a concise manner.

body

topic sentences should not be a word for word copy of your thesis.

the order of arguments in your thesis is the order of your paragraphs

depending on the length of your essay, there should be at least two justifications to your argument.

so, just as the intro has a formula, X = A + B, and so forth.

A and B should be backed up with some sources/quotes. don’t forget that if you are quoting from class notes to put either the prof’s last name, or (class notes)

be sure to have clear and concise arguments, don’t be flowery

USE WORDS THAT ARE ACCURATE. thesaurus is great but if you use a word that sounds cool but doesn’t capture the meaning you want to convey then don’t use it, because it may just change the meaning of your argument

quote whatever isn’t yours. it is completely fine if 90% of your sentences are quotes. its weird to get used to, but don’t worry about it.

conclusion

the worst part in my opinion.

synthesize don’t summarize. show how your arguments relate back to the thesis.

try not to copy paste your thesis into the conclusion, word it so that the readers understands that through XYZ, you were able to conclude and support argument W (referring back to the thesis formula)

do not add any new information, do not add quotes.

your final sentence should tie up the essay in a pretty bow, but try to avoid clichés

protips

when writing the body paragraphs, your ‘weakest’ paragraph should be in the middle, strongest as your last, and the second best as your first.

if you’re stumped on the intro, skip it. write out the body first, then the intro and you’ll be able to concisely word your thesis

think of your essay as an infomercial. your intro is the loud and clear HERES MY PRODUCT, the body is blasting information on why the product is so cool, and the conclusion is the final push for the viewer to buy that product. make your teacher want to agree with your thesis!

use a mix of paraphrase and quotes!

don’t forget your works cited lmao (the MLA Handbook is a gr8 tool, also OWL Purdue)

prime time for essay writing is in the morning or at night, but make sure you edit it meticulously

EDIT ON PAPER NOT ON YOUR SCREEN

stay humble, study hard

todaywithjudy

Wednesday on this weekly spread really bothers me. I didn’t really do anything that day besides study so it’s pretty bare.

ig: focusign ♡

studeity

9-05-2016 // 1:58pm Continuation of the notes that I posted yesterday but a different colour scheme inspired by the peach/pink 花樣年華 pt.2 album.

studypsy

love this organised notes *.*

ssehuns-deactivated20250424

Taking textbook notes is a chore. It’s tedious and boring and sometimes challenging, but hopefully these tips will help you improve your skill and shorten the time it takes you to do textbook notes!

Give yourself time: Realistically, you can’t knock out 30 pages of notes in 20 minutes. Take your time with textbook notes so they’re a good studying tool in the future. The general rule is to take how many pages you have to do and multiply it by 5: that’s how many minutes it’ll take you to do the notes.

Also, divide you notes up into manageable chunks to increase your productivity. I am personally a huge fan of using pomodoro timers, and I adjust the intervals for however long I need to.

Skim before you start taking notes: If time is an issue, don’t read your 40 page in depth before even picking up a pen, but make sure you know what you’re reading about by skimming a bit ahead of your notes. Read over section titles, and look at charts, maps, or graphs. Writing and highlighting as you read the chapter for the first time isn’t effective because you don’t know if a sentence will be important or not, so make sure you’re reading a paragraph or section in advance before writing.

Use the format they give you in the book to help take your notes: In a lot of textbooks, there will be a mini outline before the chapter itself that shows all the headings and subheadings. Those will be your guidelines! I find this super helpful because long chapters can be daunting to go into without any structure. If you don’t have one of those, use the headings and subheadings provided for you. If you haven’t already been doing this, it will help you so much.

Read actively: It’s so easy to “read” a textbook without digesting any information, but that is the last thing you want to do. Not only does it make taking notes a million times harder, but you’ll be lost in class discussions because you didn’t understand the reading. To keep from passively reading, highlight, underline, star any important information in the book itself.

Have a color coding system for highlighting or underlining and write down a key somewhere (here’s a few that you can adjust for your needs: x,x)

Use sticky notes or tabs to mark any questions or important points to come back to

Summarize important information and paraphrase: When taking the actual notes, don’t copy down full sentences word for word. Not only does writing full sentences waste a lot of time, it’s not an effective way to learn. If you can paraphrase the information, then you understand it. It’s also easier to study notes which are in your own words instead of textbook academia writing.

Be selective: You shouldn’t be writing down every fact that comes up in your textbook. If a fact ties into the bigger topic and provides evidence, then it’s probably something to keep, but you don’t need every piece of supplemental information (but do make sure you always write down the vocab). Learn your teacher’s testing style to help you decide what to write down. Could this be on the quiz/test? If the answer is yes, make sure you write it down.

Learn to abbreviate: Just like writing full sentences, writing out full words will waste time. Implement some shortenings (make sure to use ones that you’ll understand later!) into your notes. Some common ones are: b/c=because, gov=government, w/o=without, and here’s a great list of a ton of examples of abbreviations and shortenings.

Answer margin and review questions: A lot of textbooks have margin questions on every page or so that sum up what’s really important about that information. Make sure not to skip them because they’re really helpful for understanding. Write them down and answer them clearly in your notes. Most textbooks also have review questions after the chapter that check for reading comprehension, so make sure to answer those because they’ll show you if you really understood the chapter.

Don’t skip over visual sources: Maps, diagrams, illustrations, charts, and any other visuals in textbooks are so helpful. If you’re a visual learner, these things will be so essential to you and how you understand what you’re reading. Charts, tables, and diagrams sometimes also summarize information, so if you’re a visual learner it might benefit you to copy those down instead of writing it out.

Add visuals if it’ll help you: As said above, copying down charts, tables, illustrations, or diagrams can be super helpful for visual learners. They’re clear and concise, so pay attention to them.

Write your notes in a way that’s effective and makes sense to you: Mindmaps, Cornell notes, or plain outline notes are all really good forms of notetaking. Find which one works best for you to understand them and which one is most effective for your class, and use it (stuff on mindmaps and cornell notes).

Combine your class and textbook notes: If you rewrite your class notes, add in information you think is relevant from your textbook notes. Mark anything both your book and teacher said were important–you don’t want to forget any of that. If you don’t rewrite class notes, then put stars next to anything repeated.

toastyhat-deactivated20180203

I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD. If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?