Claire Keane
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
🪼
blake kathryn
JVL
hello vonnie
Mike Driver
AnasAbdin
noise dept.
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Sade Olutola
Keni
One Nice Bug Per Day
Show & Tell
Monterey Bay Aquarium
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
we're not kids anymore.
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Andulka
DEAR READER
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Philippines
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@heldersketches
inside of your chest, between the lungs and the sinew and the jealousy is you when you were 10 years old, and hadn’t yet learned to gut yourself like a fish
today, if you can, make yourself your favourite meal. hold your own hand, stroke your own cheek. at the end of the path, there’s a warm golden light the same colour as the nightlight in your childhood bedroom
｡ﾟﾟ･｡･ﾟﾟ｡ ﾟ。 𝒾𝓉 𝑔𝒾𝓇𝓁 𝓂𝑒𝒹𝒾𝒶 ﾟ･｡･ﾟ
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Oh, the Internet. A myriad of a million hyperlinks, videos, and social media platforms barraging us with contradicting advice from every single angle...and here I am to throw some more in your lap! Below are a handful of online blogs, Youtube channels, and Spotify podcasts that I myself love and live by. Truthfully, I did plan on adding a list of self help novels that transformed me into moi but....there's just far too many. Perhaps another time, my darlings! I sincerely hope that the media I've included here resonate with you and allow you to step into your highest self. Enjoy!
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ blogs
La Vie En Rose Diaries by Blair Natalia
Blogpost of Choice: Why I’m Treating Myself like the Princess I Deserve to Be ♡
The It-Girl Diaries by Lydia
Blogpost of Choice: Becoming Your Own Version Of 'That Girl'
The Skinny Confidential by Lauryn Bosstick
Blogpost of Choice: How to Remove Toxicity From Your Mind And Body
Aria Kaiser by Aria Kaiser
Blogpost of Choice: Lets Talk Food
The It Girl Guide (TIGG) by Sky Haarsma
Blogpost of Choice: Our It-Girl Essentials
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ podcasts
Early Call Her Daddy episodes
Sofia With An F by Sofia Franklyn
Busy, Yet Pretty by Jadyn Hailey
The Wellness Cafe by Trinity Tondeleir
The Skinny Confidential by The Skinny Confidential
The Balanced Blonde by Jordan Younger
The Blonde Files by Arielle Lorre
Already Friends by Allison Wetig and Ceara Kirkpatrick
Middle Ground by Jo Johnson and Caroline Stelte
Crying In Public by Sydni and Sarah
The School of Greatness by Lewis Howes
The Tony Robbins Podcast by Tony Robbins
Trying Not To Care by Ashley Corbo
For You From Eve by Olivia Eve Shabo
Unf*ck Your Brain by Kara Loewentheil
The Psychology Of Your 20's by Jenna Sbeg
Habits Of A Goddess (Affirmations)
The goop Podcast by Goop Inc.
Almost 30 by Krista Williams and Lindsey Simcik
Guide Me Glow by Shannon Tang
Girls with Goals by AnnCatherine and Caroline
Hot Girl Energy by Kaylie Stewart
The Bossbabe Podcast by Natalie Ellis and Danielle Canty
Girlboss Radio by Puno
Gals On The Go by Danielle Carolan and Brooke Miccio
Girls That Invest by Sim and Sonya
Her First $100K by Tori Dunlap
Victoria's Thoughts by Victoria de Vall
Breaking Beauty by Jill and Carlene
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ youtube channels
Alay Bowker x Give Me Glow ; vlogs, guides, and inspo
Alyse Parker; wellness, lifestyle, and spirituality
Claudia Sulewski; vlogs, style inspo, lifestyle
dear peachie; beauty, makeup tutorials, makeup trends
Elena Taber; vlogs, lifestyle, and travel
Emma MacDonald; vlogs, hauls, and modeling
Eva Meloche; vlogs, lifestyle, organization inspo
Maddie Lymburner; meals, workouts, lifestyle inspo
MadFit; every type of workout for every type of fitness journey
Makayla Merie; vlogs, workout attire, lifestyle inspo
Meghan Livingstone; holistic nutrition, gut health, meal inspo
Romee Strijd; VS angel turned vlogger
The Skinny Confidential; recipes, girl talk, and wellness
Thewizardliz; the queen of having an "it girl mindset"
Yoga With Adriene; yoga for everybody!
Much love, Auden♡
Final brush test, painted with my new rake brush pack which I’ll be releasing next week! Free / pay what you want like always! All my free brush packs can be found here and the rake brush pack will be as well!
(source)
Truth is just as hilarious as fiction.
@snarkyforlife @glassyonion THE BROTHEL
if you like crafting and also free things, might i suggest the antique pattern library?
it’s a not for profit that’s gathering books, patterns, and other materials related to crafting that are out of copyright (or getting permission from copyright holders in some cases) in order to share them online. they scan items, clean them up, then make everything available for free!
free things are great, especially when you’re just starting to get into something. like oh, i’m supposed to spend money on this hobby i just picked up 20 minutes ago???
the first time i ended up on the site, i seriously spent hours just trawling through everything. there’s the usual suspects like knitting, crochet, embroidery, but there’s also woodwork, calligraphy, and books on things like how to mount and frame pictures. with cross stitch patterns, they also make modern charts with the dmc colour codes available.
links to their webbed site and instagram:
https://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/
https://www.instagram.com/theantiquepatternlibrary/
behold, a glorious cat cross stitch pattern (link goes to antique pattern library page):
[image id: Multicolour charted cross stitch design of a cat sitting on a red pillow with tassels, holding a green ball]
Hey, I saw a lot of people in the notes asking. I follow these people on tiktok and A: the seeds they use are all native to their region (California) and B: they sell native seed mixes, so far primarily for California but they’re making more mixes every so often. They also share the ‘After’ results as they start sprouting so yeah it does work, they rarely get ripped out from what they show.
@acureforgravity
@glassyonion
Someone: *insults fanfiction*
Me:
Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things
If you’ve been paying attention for the last couple of years, you might have noticed that the world has a bit of a misinformation problem.
The problem isn’t just with the recent election conspiracies, either. The last couple of years has brought us the rise (and occasionally fall) of misinformation-based movements like:
Sandy Hook conspiracies
Gamergate
Pizzagate
The MRA/incel/MGTOW movements
anti-vaxxers
flat-earthers
the birther movement
the Illuminati
climate change denial
Spygate
Holocaust denial
COVID-19 denial
5G panic
QAnon
But why do people believe this stuff?
It would be easy - too easy - to say that people fall for this stuff because they’re stupid. We all want to believe that smart people like us are immune from being taken in by deranged conspiracies. But it’s just not that simple. People from all walks of life are going down these rabbit holes - people with degrees and professional careers and rich lives have fallen for these theories, leaving their loved ones baffled. Decades-long relationships have splintered this year, as the number of people flocking to these conspiracies out of nowhere reaches a fever pitch.
So why do smart people start believing some incredibly stupid things? It’s because:
Our brains are built to identify patterns.
Our brains fucking love puzzles and patterns. This is a well-known phenomenon called apophenia, and at one point, it was probably helpful for our survival - the prehistoric human who noticed patterns in things like animal migration, plant life cycles and the movement of the stars was probably a lot more likely to survive than the human who couldn’t figure out how to use natural clues to navigate or find food.
The problem, though, is that we can’t really turn this off. Even when we’re presented with completely random data, we’ll see patterns. We see patterns in everything, even when there’s no pattern there. This is why people see Jesus in a burnt piece of toast or get superstitious about hockey playoffs or insist on always playing at a certain slot machine - our brains look for patterns in the constant barrage of random information in our daily lives, and insist that those patterns are really there, even when they’re completely imagined.
A lot of conspiracy theories have their roots in people making connections between things that aren’t really connected. The belief that “vaccines cause autism” was bolstered by the fact that the first recognizable symptoms of autism happen to appear at roughly the same time that children receive one of their rounds of childhood immunizations - the two things are completely unconnected, but our brains have a hard time letting go of the pattern they see there. Likewise, many people were quick to latch on to the fact that early maps of COVID infections were extremely similar to maps of 5G coverage - the fact that there’s a reasonable explanation for this (major cities are more likely to have both high COVID cases AND 5G networks) doesn’t change the fact that our brains just really, really want to see a connection there.
Our brains love proportionality.
Specifically, our brains like effects to be directly proportional to their causes - in other words, we like it when big events have big causes, and small causes only lead to small events. It’s uncomfortable for us when the reverse is true. And so anytime we feel like a “big” event (celebrity death, global pandemic, your precious child is diagnosed with autism) has a small or unsatisfying cause (car accident, pandemics just sort of happen every few decades, people just get autism sometimes), we sometimes feel the need to start looking around for the bigger, more sinister, “true” cause of that event.
Consider, for instance, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. In 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times by a Turkish member of a known Italian paramilitary secret society who’d recently escaped from prison - on the surface, it seems like the sort of thing conspiracy theorists salivate over, seeing how it was an actual multinational conspiracy. But they never had much interest in the assassination attempt. Why? Because the Pope didn’t die. He recovered from his injuries and went right back to Pope-ing. The event didn’t have a serious outcome, and so people are content with the idea that one extremist carried it out. The death of Princess Diana, however, has been fertile ground for conspiracy theories; even though a woman dying in a car accident is less weird than a man being shot four times by a paid political assassin, her death has attracted more conspiracy theories because it had a bigger outcome. A princess dying in a car accident doesn’t feel big enough. It’s unsatisfying. We want such a monumentous moment in history to have a bigger, more interesting cause.
These theories prey on pre-existing fear and anger.
Are you a terrified new parent who wants the best for their child and feels anxious about having them injected with a substance you don’t totally understand? Congrats, you’re a prime target for the anti-vaccine movement. Are you a young white male who doesn’t like seeing more and more games aimed at women and minorities, and is worried that “your” gaming culture is being stolen from you? You might have been very interested in something called Gamergate. Are you a right-wing white person who worries that “your” country and way of life is being stolen by immigrants, non-Christians and coastal liberals? You’re going to love the “all left-wingers are Satantic pedo baby-eaters” messaging of QAnon.
Misinformation and conspiracy theories are often aimed strategically at the anxieties and fears that people are already experiencing. No one likes being told that their fears are insane or irrational; it’s not hard to see why people gravitate towards communities that say “yes, you were right all along, and everyone who told you that you were nuts to be worried about this is just a dumb sheep. We believe you, and we have evidence that you were right along, right here.” Fear is a powerful motivator, and you can make people believe and do some pretty extreme things if you just keep telling them “yes, that thing you’re afraid of is true, but also it’s way worse than you could have ever imagined.”
Real information is often complicated, hard to understand, and inherently unsatisfying.
The information that comes from the scientific community is often very frustrating for a layperson; we want science to have hard-and-fast answers, but it doesn’t. The closest you get to a straight answer is often “it depends” or “we don’t know, but we think X might be likely”. Understanding the results of a scientific study with any confidence requires knowing about sampling practices, error types, effect sizes, confidence intervals and publishing biases. Even asking a simple question like “is X bad for my child” will usually get you a complicated, uncertain answer - in most cases, it really just depends. Not understanding complex topics makes people afraid - it makes it hard to trust that they’re being given the right information, and that they’re making the right choices.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation, on the other hand, are often simple, and they are certain. Vaccines bad. Natural things good. 5G bad. Organic food good. The reason girls won’t date you isn’t a complex combination of your social skills, hygiene, appearance, projected values, personal circumstances, degree of extroversion, luck and life phase - girls won’t date you because feminism is bad, and if we got rid of feminism you’d have a girlfriend. The reason Donald Trump was an unpopular president wasn’t a complex combination of his public bigotry, lack of decorum, lack of qualifications, open incompetence, nepotism, corruption, loss of soft power, refusal to uphold the basic responsibilities of his position or his constant lying - they hated him because he was fighting a secret sex cult and they’re all in it.
Instead of making you feel stupid because you’re overwhelmed with complex information, expert opinions and uncertain advice, conspiracy theories make you feel smart - smarter, in fact, than everyone who doesn’t believe in them. And that’s a powerful thing for people living in a credential-heavy world.
Many conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.
It is very difficult to prove a negative. If I tell you, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a purple swan, it would be very difficult for me to actually prove that to you - I could spend the rest of my life photographing swans and looking for swans and talking to people who know a lot about swans, and yet the slim possibility would still exist that there was a purple swan out there somewhere that I just hadn’t found yet. That’s why, in most circumstances, the burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim - if you tell me that purple swans exist, we should continue to assume that they don’t until you actually produce a purple swan.
Conspiracy theories, however, are built so that it’s nearly impossible to “prove” them wrong. Is there any proof that the world’s top-ranking politicians and celebrities are all in a giant child sex trafficking cult? No. But can you prove that they aren’t in a child sex-trafficking cult? No, not really. Even if I, again, spent the rest of my life investigating celebrities and following celebrities and talking to people who know celebrities, I still couldn’t definitely prove that this cult doesn’t exist - there’s always a chance that the specific celebrities I’ve investigated just aren’t in the cult (but other ones are!) or that they’re hiding evidence of the cult even better than we think. Lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is always treated as more evidence for the theory - we can’t find anything because this goes even higher up than we think! They’re even more sophisticated at hiding this than we thought! People deeply entrenched in these theories don’t even realize that they are stuck in a circular loop where everything seems to prove their theory right - they just see a mountain of “evidence” for their side.
Our brains are very attached to information that we “learned” by ourselves.
Learning accurate information is not a particularly interactive or exciting experience. An expert or reliable source just presents the information to you in its entirety, you read or watch the information, and that’s the end of it. You can look for more information or look for clarification of something, but it’s a one-way street - the information is just laid out for you, you take what you need, end of story.
Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost never show their hand all at once. They drop little breadcrumbs of information that slowly lead you where they want you to go. This is why conspiracy theorists are forever telling you to “do your research” - they know that if they tell you everything at once, you won’t believe them. Instead, they want you to indoctrinate yourself slowly over time, by taking the little hints they give you and running off to find or invent evidence that matches that clue. If I tell you that celebrities often wear symbols that identify them as part of a cult and that you should “do your research” about it, you can absolutely find evidence that substantiates my claim - there are literally millions of photos of celebrities out there, and anyone who looks hard enough is guaranteed to find common shapes, poses and themes that might just mean something (they don’t - eyes and triangles are incredibly common design elements, and if I took enough pictures of you, I could also “prove” that you also clearly display symbols that signal you’re in the cult).
The fact that you “found” the evidence on your own, however, makes it more meaningful to you. We trust ourselves, and we trust that the patterns we uncover by ourselves are true. It doesn’t feel like you’re being fed misinformation - it feels like you’ve discovered an important truth that “they” didn’t want you to find, and you’ll hang onto that for dear life.
Older people have not learned to be media-literate in a digital world.
Fifty years ago, not just anyone could access popular media. All of this stuff had a huge barrier to entry - if you wanted to be on TV or be in the papers or have a radio show, you had to be a professional affiliated with a major media brand. Consumers didn’t have easy access to niche communities or alternative information - your sources of information were basically your local paper, the nightly news, and your morning radio show, and they all more or less agreed on the same set of facts. For decades, if it looked official and it appeared in print, you could probably trust that it was true.
Of course, we live in a very different world today - today, any asshole can accumulate an audience of millions, even if they have no credentials and nothing they say is actually true (like “The Food Babe”, a blogger with no credentials in medicine, nutrition, health sciences, biology or chemistry who peddles health misinformation to the 3 million people who visit her blog every month). It’s very tough for older people (and some younger people) to get their heads around the fact that it’s very easy to create an “official-looking” news source, and that they can’t necessarily trust everything they find on the internet. When you combine that with a tendency toward “clickbait headlines” that often misrepresent the information in the article, you have a generation struggling to determine who they can trust in a media landscape that doesn’t at all resemble the media landscape they once knew.
These beliefs become a part of someone’s identity.
A person doesn’t tell you that they believe in anti-vaxx information - they tell you that they ARE an anti-vaxxer. Likewise, people will tell you that they ARE a flat-earther, a birther, or a Gamergater. By design, these beliefs are not meant to be something you have a casual relationship with, like your opinion of pizza toppings or how much you trust local weather forecasts - they are meant to form a core part of your identity.
And once something becomes a core part of your identity, trying to make you stop believing it becomes almost impossible. Once we’ve formed an initial impression of something, facts just don’t change our minds. If you identify as an antivaxxer and I present evidence that disproves your beliefs, in your mind, I’m not correcting inaccurate information - I am launching a very personal attack against a core part of who you are. In fact, the more evidence I present, the more you will burrow down into your antivaxx beliefs, more confident than ever that you are right. Admitting that you are wrong about something that is important to you is painful, and your brain would prefer to simply deflect conflicting information rather than subject you to that pain.
We can see this at work with something called the confirmation bias. Simply put, once we believe something, our brains hold on to all evidence that that belief is true, and ignore evidence that it’s false. If I show you 100 articles that disprove your pet theory and 3 articles that confirm it, you’ll cling to those 3 articles and forget about the rest. Even if I show you nothing but articles that disprove your theory, you’ll likely go through them and pick out any ambiguous or conflicting information as evidence for “your side”, even if the conclusion of the article shows that you are wrong - our brains simply care about feeling right more than they care about what is actually true.
There is a strong community aspect to these theories.
There is no one quite as supportive or as understanding as a conspiracy theorist - provided, of course, that you believe in the same conspiracy theories that they do. People who start looking into these conspiracy theories are told that they aren’t crazy, and that their fears are totally valid. They’re told that the people in their lives who doubted them were just brainwashed sheep, but that they’ve finally found a community of people who get where they’re coming from. Whenever they report back to the group with the “evidence” they’ve found or the new elaborations on the conspiracy theory that they’ve been thinking of (“what if it’s even worse than we thought??”), they are given praise for their valuable contributions. These conspiracy groups often become important parts of people’s social networks - they can spend hours every day talking with like-minded people from these communities and sharing their ideas.
Of course, the flipside of this is that anyone who starts to doubt or move away from the conspiracy immediately loses that community and social support. People who have broken away from antivaxx and QAnon often say that the hardest part of leaving was losing the community and friendships they’d built - not necessarily giving up on the theory itself. Many people are rejected by their real-life friends and family once they start to get entrenched in conspiracy theories; the friendships they build online in the course of researching these theories often become the only social supports they have left, and losing those supports means having no one to turn to at all. This is by design - the threat of losing your community has kept people trapped in abusive religious sects and cults for as long as those things have existed.
I made this so now all y'all have to look at it.
Every thousand notes I’ll make him thiccer.
date of origin: 5th of january, 2017.
hold on i’m gonna add on to this
I FUCKING KNEW IT
I fucking love this post
@asthesunwentdown @joeymarahart
wait @trenchcoatmimic this…. this is a good post
What is this
@hellsite-hall-of-fame
LMAO @magicmumu2
So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.
I'm going to try it.
I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.
All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.
This is your "show not tell" advice explained!
THIS
hm. im REALLY against any variation of “this rule is true in any context” because it defeats the point of creativity, but this is good advice for a) beefing up your descriptions and b) communicating emotional tension (eg, the MC has not admitted or processes this feeling but you want to show them having it)
That said, sometimes you would want to just state the character’s opinion. (& maybe contrast it with their actions, the situation) or use a shorthand when it’s like an introductory side detail.
What I like about it though is that it’s NOT stated as a “don’t ever do this in any context” rule - it’s not a rule, it’s a challenge. Don’t ever do this for the next six months and see how it changes your writing. Not never do it again, just try it and then you can go back to using them but you’ll probably do it way more sparingly because you’ve built up other tools to use instead of those words.
“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” @louisethebaker on Twitter
No love, however brief, is wasted.
No time either. Even if you invest it in people who leave you. When you’re building others, you’re building yourself also. No time is wasted.
I have a problem. As I am right now I feel incomplete in my work. I'm mainly a fan-artist and I probably will always be, it's what I love doing but I guess you can say that I feel a little ashamed. A tiny voice in my head tells me I'm lazy. Fan-artistry is lazy and I should get serious. So to quench it I spend and insane amount of my time(sometimes skipping school/time w friends and days of sleep) on paintings to force myself better and anytime not drawing is wasted time. I've lost control.
Hi there, I’m really sorry you’re feeling this way. That sounds like a whole lot of pressure and anxiety constantly weighing on you.
I think there are two components to address here:
1) Fanart. There are always going to be naysayers, but if fanart brings you joy, fulfills you creatively, and is conducive toward your life goals and artistic goals, then there is no reason for you to stop creating it. There are a huge number of successful artists who’s body of work is significantly made up fanart.
I know a lot of illustrators who were discovered due to their fanart and have thriving careers, many working for the companies who’s IPs they were a fan of! A lot of the people at the studio I work at are there because they are huge fans of previous projects by the studio! I love when artists create entirely new IPs and worlds for me to delve into, but I also love seeing worlds and characters I’m familiar with re-imagined. I’m no authority on this (and honestly, no one is) but do what makes you happy with no shame, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.
I also think no one ever has to choose what their “thing” is and stick solely to that. Experiment, try new things, and follow the path that brings you joy and fulfillment. I have no idea what I’ll be doing in 10 years artistically, and that is very exciting to me.
2) Overworking. I think there is no easy answer to this, and I’ve definitely dealt with my fair share of work related anxiety in the past. I think it’s really important for you to surround yourself with people who affirm that you are doing enough and need to take care of yourself.
I have found it is important for me to have a balance of people in my life. I have friends who will push me to my limits when I need it and who will continually challenge me in all aspects of my life. I also have friends who remind me that I need to sleep, I need to eat, and I neeeeeeed to take breaks.
If you don’t set aside time to sleep, relax, exercise, and nourish your body, your work will ultimately suffer. I know it can feel necessary and dire for your success to stay up all night and dedicate every last minute to your artwork, but try to remind yourself that doing so is actually harmful. You will achieve greater artistic success in life if you can prioritize self-care and balance.
When your brain is telling you that you NEED to stay up all night, say right back to your brain “No, I need to sleep!” Sleep is so important. Rest and relaxation are necessary. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. You may make short term gains by pushing beyond your limits, but you will burn out. Finding a pace that is maintainable has taken me literally years. I know this is not an easy process.
Affirm your self-worth beyond what you create. Affirm that your value as a person is not based on productivity. Remember that taking time for rest and recover is vital, valuable, and will lead to a more successful life in the long run. If you can, let the people in your life know that you’re struggling with these things so they can help affirm positivity and self-care.
I have forced myself (sometimes kicking and screaming) to set aside lots of time for cooking healthy food, taking long walks, and doing fun things with the people I care about. I am not always successful, but making this my number one priority has led to so much improvement in my art and state of mind that I know intrinsically I must keep pushing for it. Balance is key.
Best of luck!
Now that we are not in Seattle anymore...here's the sketchbook cover I drew for writing/drawing down all the best quotes we had during the trip and surprising Jessi for her birthday! Still working on that and editing all the photos I took!
Just listening to some good tunes and comedic banter.
