and then my brain broke

i just love everything too much

[lilcowgirl7-deactivated20210223]

I needed this drag. Let’s change guys and not look back

[user87262893]

working out your brain is a must!!

• hydrate it by drinking lots of water

• eat dark chocolate and blueberries and walnuts and salmon and other foods high in antioxidants!!

• play little brain games on your phone; I like wordconenct! anything that makes you think!

• read books. It’s simple but necessary. Even better - join a book club, or read with a friend, so you can have discussions after. This will improve your reading comprehension.

• do puzzles - it doesnt have to be sudoku, I love playing Beat Saber on the Oculus Rift because it makes my brain have to match colorful patterns to physical movements very quickly!

• learn a new dance - even a tik tok trendy dance. Learning new dance moves are proven to strengthen synapses!!

• go bird watching, or foraging, or anything outdoors that requires you to explore pattern recognition and visual searching

• watch a movie with the intent of analysis - this is best done with a cinephile friend!! talk about tropes and symbolism and character growth

• cross stitch, or sew, or do anything that requires matching nimble hand movements to patterns

• play or learn an instrument!

• develop a consistent sleep schedule (or as close to consistent as you can get!)

• when eating, try to identify the ingredients and flavors you’re perceiving!

I hope this helps :)

[moonlightwaterhealing]

I like how this went from me feeling like “hm why is this attacking me 🤨” at first, but feeling grateful seeing an added guide on a genuine expansion on a “ how to” work out the brain. This genuinely helps a bunch. People find solace in doing activities that get them through life by doing said activities of phone/tv or if that’s all they’ve ever known in their life to get them through things + etc tho. However, this was very impt to point out. Slowly beginning incorporating things to work the brain in ones own time.

[plantyhamchuk]

We’re in an epidemic of chronic lack of sleep! When’s the last time you had MONTHS of regularly getting 8+ hours of sleep per night?

I’m listening to super fascinating book on sleep right now, called ‘Why We Sleep’ by an accomplished sleep researcher and I CANNOT recommend it highly enough. I’m already doing things from this book for the past 4 days and my life has gotten a lot better despite, you know, everything.

It really helps to have a sleep tracker like a fitbit that will track how much of each sleep stage you get each night, and how much you actually sleep at night all total.

He’s got hundreds of pages full of studies on why getting 7-8 hours of sleep, at a minimum, EVERY NIGHT yes even school/work nights, is critical*. It will help you live a longer, healthier life. It can make living with mental illness and neurospiciness easier.

Conversely, chronic lack of sleep, even just an hour or two every night, can cause issues with glucose regulation leading to weight gain, increase the incidence of a variety of cancers, fuck with your memory, destroy your creativity, exacerbate anxiety and other mental illnesses, and lots more.

Different parts of your sleep cycle do different things for your brain. How much to get depends a lot on your age. Also as you age, your sleep will get shittier so this is something to take seriously despite what capitalism/your boss says.

Very very roughly speaking:

Stage 4 / deep sleep / delta wave sleep is the physically restorative part of sleep. This is where fluids literally wash through brain and clean out gunk (a relatively recent discovery). This is critical to brain health - this is the phase of sleep that is most hindered in people with Alzheimers where the brain ends up covered in toxic plaques that destroy the brain. You WANT to get plenty of this each night. You tend to get most of this early in the sleep cycle, and less as the night goes on.

Note: If you have ADHD you want to keep an eye on your deep sleep and make certain you’re getting enough, ADHD meds can horribly fuck with sleep, additionally there is some sort of correlation between ADHD and Alzheimers and insufficient deep sleep. (I usually get a bit over an hour every night, V who has severe ADHD struggles to get 3 hours total per week)

REM / dreaming sleep: this is a mental health restorative part of sleep. This is also when memories of the day, things learned during the day, are consolidated. You don’t get a second shot at this BTW, if you get a shitty night’s sleep and then the next night sleep much better, you’re not getting to make up that earlier night of shitty sleep.

REM is also a super fascinating time where the brain is extremely active but it does NOT function like it does during the day, it goes hog wild in a completely different manner, without the frontal cortex directing things so much. People who are able to dream about a problem they’re struggling to solve, they solve it 3x-10x easier/faster if they dream about it in REM. REM can provide new insights and intuitions. REM has been the source of scientific discoveries, music, and more.

REM happens around the end of your sleep. If you never seem to get quite enough sleep, you may be cutting off your REM and instead need to go to bed earlier. This is a serious issue with teenagers who are forced to go to school at a time when they ought to be getting REM (their sleep cycle is naturally shifted to go to bed late and wake up late, schools and parents are actually fucking teens up a lot here).

REM is also when people reset the part of the brain that knows how to read facial expressions (and determine if someone is a threat or not). Sleep deprived people cannot read facial expressions nearly as well as someone getting 7-8 hours regular nightly sleep with ample REM - and will see someone as hostile when they are more just meh/whatever/neutral in reality.

Note: YES there is a correlation here with autism. Unfortunately people with autism are known to have all kinds of sleep issues, including way less REM sleep and insomnia. Like Alzheimers, this is well documented in the scientific re

So for brain health, I would prioritize water and sleep. None of those other things listed will do one much good if one is only getting shitty sleep. Once you’ve got your sleep worked out of course check out that full list, there’s good ideas in there.

Additionally, if you have mental illnesses or neurospiciness, research about your particular condition and known sleep issues. You might be able to do certain things to enable better sleep to make your life a lot easier.

*for the vast majority of people. It’s a bell curve thing. I personally need more in the 8-10 hr range. But many people wildly overestimate how much sleep they’re getting. I learned from my sleep tracker that I lose an average of 1 hour of sleep per night - during sleep! - and that also this is pretty normal.

[natdrinkstea]

me to anyone: you should listen to this cool musical called in the green it has gorgeous powerful lyrics and music and incredible harmonies, it's really beautiful

in the green, every other song: rrrrRRrrrrREEEEEEEEEEEEEEErrrerrwrrrrrrrrreeeee huwoCOYK!! do wop. ah ah ah AYEAYEAYEAYEAYEAYEAUEAYEAEY rrrrrRrrrrr OughOUGHwaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooooooo *four minutes of latin chanting*

[musicalgifs]

Are there any other musicals with a similar musical style to In the Green?

this has been in my drafts for a while because honestly i'm not sure? of the ones i know of, dave malloy's shows feel most similar to me, particularly ghost quartet. but i'm not very good at picking up on musical styles, so i'm going to post this and see if anyone else has any ideas.

[kingdomwillfallforasong]

adding a suggestion for three houses by dave malloy (album dropped about two weeks ago)! it even has mia pak in it, who was also in in the green.

[the-berries-and-the-plums]

my amazing partner @i-aintlonely convinced me to make a tumblr specifically to make this post so here we go:

my Three Houses name theory

TL;DR: i think the three pigs in Dave Malloy’s Three Houses—Susan, Sadie, and Beckett—are named after real-life writers whose work aligns with their arcs. Susan = Susan Stewart (nostalgia, collections, self-mythologizing), Sadie = Sadie Plant (digital spaces, gamification, technology & compulsion), Beckett = Samuel Beckett (isolation, fatalism, existential despair). full analysis under da cut

okay. so. i was thinking about beckett and wondering about the connection to Samuel Beckett. i’ve never read (writer) Beckett, but even a cursory glance at his work and quotes reveals more than just an Ireland-based connection to Pig Beckett’s house.

i’ll just leave this quote from him on love and relationships here:

“Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.”

this almost feels like another version of “if i can shut the door, i won’t feel like this anymore, love always leaves you in the end”. glorifying isolation and withdrawal as a show of strength

Beckett wrote extensively on isolation, the meaningless of time, and decay. he was known for an often bleak and absurdist minimalist existentialism which closely mirrors (pig) Beckett’s. Beckettian protagonists are frequently broken, passive, and resigned, unable to affect change on their environments, much like Pig Beckett wasting away in his basement.

if Pig Beckett is in fact named after the writer, it works out to complete a nice symmetry: Susan/Sadie/(Samuel) Beckett — Julian/Jasmine/Jacqueline. SSS —JJJ. this is at least a satisfying pattern, if not definitive proof.

in my eyes, Beckett is almost certainly named after Samuel Beckett. this got me thinking about another writer whose work really reminds me a lot of Three Houses, one whose name i initially dismissed as a coincidence when the connections jumped out to me on my first or second listen. but knowing dave malloy, and after making the Beckett connection, i realized i shouldn’t be so sure there wasn’t a larger pattern to uncover…

that writer is cultural critic Susan Stewart, author of a favorite book of mine, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. this book explores how collections and souvenirs function as “containers” for nostalgia. Stewart argues that nostalgia is a narrative we project onto the past—a narrative that serves an ideological purpose and against which we construct our identities. and, Stewart argues, the act of collecting, categorizing, and displaying objects is one of the main ways we construct and maintain that narrative.

the way Susan obsessively curates and “excavates” her Grandmama’s possessions encapsulates this impulse. she turns every book, every knick-knack, every piece of furniture, into a souvenir of a romanticized past, of her family history and her grandmama’s life as she imagines it.

Stewart explains this desire: “The souvenir distinguishes experiences. We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.”

susan’s souvenirs aren’t reminders of things she remembers; they’re placeholders for things she never lived, events that “exist only through the invention of narrative.” her entire sense of self is built around this invention, her obsession with turning a ghostly, incomplete history into something tangible and legible—something she can cleanly define herself within or against.

Stewart discusses souvenirs and collections (and books!) as “miniatures”, which she uses to mean anything which creates for its user/reader a “self-contained world”, a kind of immersive, all-encompassing narrative. crucially, these miniature worlds are inherently fictive—idealized reconstructions, just as a physical miniature (or a digital miniature *cough cough* Sadie) is a reconstruction of a real object, but is not that object itself, no matter how high-fidelity it is. nostalgia works the same way: its narrative acts as an idealized “miniature” of the past, even a past never actually lived.

Stewart also paints the countryside as the landscape of nostalgia, and of retrospect. the rural landscape is thought of as static, unchanging, a witness to the past (“the birch trees stand like ghosts”). on a more metaphorical level, just as the past is infinitely knowable (through research, excavation, and myth-making), the countryside is infinitely visible, stretching out before us, “maplike” in contrast to the shifting, unpredictable vantage points of a pedestrian in a city (making the city the uncertain landscape of the future, according to Stewart)

susan’s mythologizing of her family history—her obsessive engagement with grandmama’s objects as souvenirs of a grand, moralistic narrative—is a near-perfect depiction of what susan stewart describes in On Longing. and the eventual collapse of the secure identity that narrative provided her is precisely what Stewart warns can happen when nostalgia becomes more real to us than reality—when it moves beyond its utility as a tool for connection and understanding and transforms into a deep, intrinsically insatiable pit of longing.

so finally, of course I’m thinking: “for this theory to hold weight, there has to be a writer that matches Sadie”

and i’m pretty sure there is!

Sadie Plant is a philosopher and theorist associated with the cyberfeminism movement. One of Plant’s key focuses is the ways in which virtual spaces empower users—particularly women—to exert control they lack or are barred from IRL. this aligns directly with sadie’s desire to control her digital village as her real-life routine spirals into disarray.

in Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997), she analyzes the deeply immersive and compulsive relationship between humans and technology, exploring how digital information systems become entangled with and reshape human behavior.

Plant describes this digital rewiring in a 1999 interview with San Jose State’s research journal Switch: “There are many historical and functional parallels between drugs and software - both are difficult to detect and, just as data is moved around the Net, these communicating chemicals shuffle information through the neural system. And they can also ‘change the operating system’”

I think the parallels to Sadie’s compulsive engagement with her game world are clear: the way her way of thinking and existing (her ‘operating system’) becomes compulsively enmeshed with the game’s logic, her cognition and neurological reward systems subsumed by the comforting simplicity of a cleanly-ordered system (“sometimes it feels like half of me is missing”). it feels in line with (or perhaps like a darker extension of) Plant’s ideas.

So to sum up the theory:

Beckett is named after Samuel Beckett

Susan is named after Susan Stewart

Sadie is named after Sadie Plant

This could very well just be the result of coincidence, wishful thinking, and overactive autistic pattern recognition, but I’m convinced I’m onto something…

it’s compelling just how closely each house seems to align with the central themes and messages in its corresponding author’s work — and possibly even the author themself. Susan’s romantic, ecstatic, cascading sensory descriptions, laden with metaphor and simile (“the air is latticed with birds”) remind me a lot of Susan Stewart’s famously dense, intellectual, and poetic prose. as a cultural critic, Susan Stewart, like Pig Susan, is an intent analyst, crafter of narrative, and maker of meaning. Pig Beckett’s entire pandemic worldview feels like a distillation of Samuel Beckett’s bleakly existential writings — but also of his life, which was marked by intense privacy, isolation, and mental health struggles including depression and possible alcoholism. and Pig Sadie’s initially unbridled sense of creativity and control within the game world mirrors Sadie Plant’s hyper-optimistic, 1990s utopian view of the transcendental and liberatory potential of computer technology, contrasted with “drifting through the haze” of meaningless, dopamine-maxxing, engagement-baiting content that now makes up so much of our digital spaces.

so I think each author abstractly serves as the backbone of Three Houses’ intellectual understanding of each pig’s flawed approach to healing, but also simultaneously represents the crux of their respective pig’s behavioral patterns, limitations, and cognitive biases. it makes sense that this would be the case when you consider the grandparents’ message; the biases and idiosyncratic cognition of each character both limit them and hold the key to their healing and growth — through “dancing with the wolf” and accepting their own idiosyncrasies the pigs can attain new insight and understanding.

I want to reiterate/disclaim that Susan Stewart is the only one of these writers whose work I’ve actually read outside of research for this post, so if anyone more familiar with any of them wants to jump in with something I missed, i’d love to hear it!

all told, this is just a speculative fan theory which could very well be coincidence. but personally i’m choosing to believe it until proven wrong (which hopefully won’t be in the next few days as dave malloy gradually adds genius annotations lol)

[my-darling-boy]

I was having writers block and so I took a break and soon enough it was 3 in the morning and I had impulsively sewn together a tiny mouse you’re welcome

[my-darling-boy]

For those of you who asked, I have made a sewing tutorial on how to make your very own Peaches the Mouse!

[my-darling-boy]

I see people reblogging this with “to buy” but this pattern is free??? Someone even asked me “why don’t you charge money for it, it took you forever to put the document together” and I said “Not a lot of people have money and if they have some fabric scraps and a couple of buttons lying around they can make themselves a little mouse friend for free and that might make them happy and that makes me happier than receiving money???” Make yourself a liddol creacher! Heals the Soul!

[kingdomwillfallforasong]

Me when I woke up from a dream where I was hanging out with Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada.

[andtosaturn]

running over the same old ground, what have we found? the same old fears.

PINK FLOYD: wish you were here

[kingdomwillfallforasong]

This legit feels like it was made for me. Wish You Were Here is so damn close to my heart. As is Lover.

[hollyarmstrong]

‪I hope Taylor pulled some Tom Riddle shit with these diaries we’re getting. I need a reason to buy a quill pen & blame everything I do on the mind control of a Swiftcrux.‬

‪Me: My name is Holly.‬

‪Journal: hello Holly, I am Queen of Bridge City. Welcome to the Chamber of Easter Eggs.‬

[kingdomwillfallforasong]

Honestly one of the best things about Lover release week has been seeing how much the musical theatre and Taylor Swift fandoms cross over. Basically we all have excellent taste in music.

[lizafton]

[sciaphobe]

samoyeds are really just stage-3 evolutions of pomeranians.

Unevolved pomeranian

American eskimos are the awkward stage 2 evolution

Final evolution is samoyed. Ancient legendary pokemon.

[chloros1s]

Great Pyrenees- Mega Evolution

[vysanthe]

This doesn’t match my blog theme but this is so true. 

[squat-mitzvah-deactivated202010]

No post has ever made me quite this happy. Gold Pomeranians are shinies

[kingdomwillfallforasong]

do you ever open tumblr and you've immediately had enough internet

[citrusnoodle-deactivated2020120]

**psa**

hey u i got somethin important to tell u

come here fren

yayyy k so this is like super important n like the entire world needs to kno

ur amazing

ur a kind and good person

u deserve all the happiness in the world 

[ingridbergman-deactivated202001]

Most everyone’s mad here.

Alice in Wonderland (1951) dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske.

[6xthsense]

no way no fucking way....

NO fuckifn way

[roadtohadestown]

la la la, my dudes

[roadtohadestown]

this took me exactly one week

it’s like. 201 frames.

yes, the silhouettes were heavily inspired by greek pottery, and they do have their reasons for being there

thank u for all the support, i very much appreciate it

[drawsusydraw]

I SWEAR IF SOMEONE ELSE SAYS THAT “WAITRESS IS CLOSING FOR SIX THE MUSICAL🙄” IM GONNA SCREAM.

Waitress is not closing because they are bringing in six. Waitress was closing either way. Whenever a show closes they need to bring another in ASAP to keep money coming into the theatre. Same goes for every broadway show ever.

So kids what did we learn today?

That saying “ I hate that X show is closing so Y show can replace it, ugh” does not make anyone sympathize with the fact that your fave show is closing, it only shows your lack of knowledge about how the theatre system works. But it’s okay, you can still learn something new every day.

Waitress is gonna be missed, but it had a GREAT run, and will live on in musical theatre history. It was the only show to survive the Hamilton season and it lasted longer than most shows do nowadays.

[kingdomwillfallforasong]

PREACH