♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

*☆ taking life on step by step ☆*

[hairtusk]

absolutely nothing in the world pleases me more than my expandable bedside table

[formlab]

Tomète

[weltenwellen]

I Remember The Carrots Ada Limón

[eroscestlavie]

I need to stop replying to “how do you make friends in your 30s?” threads because all my answers boil down to “you have to want to know people instead of have friends” and I don’t think people wanna hear that

[anti-parent]

yesterday & today i've been thinking a lot about what it means to take children & teens seriously as knowledge creators. because of course people jump to the "oh so you want me to ask a 5 year old why the sky is blue act like the answer is true"

well no. but we should still be asking 5 year olds why the sky is blue. not just as a precursor to telling them the Right Answer but to encourage them to critically examine the things we take for granted every day. even if they don't know the correct answer immediately, whatever their answer is will tell you a lot about how they view the world. and it gets you as an older person in the practice of asking younger people for information instead of just assuming you have it all and they have none. and then if you ask them a question that you don't know the answer to, and they don't know the answer either, then you get to experience that process of discovery together.

this is something i need to work on. i answer a lot of "why" questions from the kids but i don't ask them many.

[anti-parent]

and then it extends to creative endeavors too. i'm a classically trained pianist & flautist and i really like that i got that experience growing up. it was one of the main ways that i got to enjoy being really good at something at a young age. but it took me a good 5 years of being absolutely miserable in piano lessons before i learned to enjoy it at all. and that was because of LABOR ALIENATION fuck ok i'm putting it all together now. i didn't get to choose what genre to play, what pieces to play, or how much to practice. my job was to reproduce The Greats with whatever little personality flair i could manage to add without bastardizing the work. i learned a lot of music theory but it was mostly so i could understand the pieces i was playing, not so i could use it to create my own work. nobody gave a shit about that.

i know i'm probably just reinventing the suzuki method or whatever but god how different would it have been if i'd been taught how to use music theory as building blocks to interpret my own experience, to create my own work. to have that as the central purpose of music education from the beginning, and then add education about historical movements & artists as a way to further inspire new creations. instead of acting like music composition is a right you have to earn.

what if we treated children's creations seriously as a body of work instead of as practice for the Real Thing. what then.

[radiant-sunlight-angel]

i have a friend doing piano lessons who is working on the exams before ABRSM exams (so shes rlly good at piano basically) and she absolutely hates it. her opinion of composition is that it is a task in her exams, that she has to "prepare" for composition.

on the other hand a family friend who is like 10 is encouraged to write his own songs and rlly finds joy in piano. he wrote this rlly lovely song that isnt the most expressive, beautiful thing ever, sure, but it's rlly lovely. and his family encourages it.

thats the thing i love about jazz. you are supposed to take the thing and make it your own. everything i play contains my soul

[anti-parent]

you got it exactly lmfao this post is based on my experience prepping for ABRSM too! and i LOVE playing jazz piano for the same reason. so exciting & spontaneous & beautiful. playing with a jazz band was such a magical feeling and it was also really hard to get used to after 10+ years of rote learning. i'm really glad your family friend is getting to do that, that's so special :')

[headspace-hotel]

My brother and I have been talking a lot about music (he is a guitarist and I don't play anything) and my friends that played music when i was in highschool made it sound like the most complicated torture labyrinth in the world, but apparently people can and do learn to play by just. picking up an instrument and messing with it until it makes neat sounds.

[kyraneko]

music can be what fanfiction is

[fuck-customers]

[magnetictapedatastorage]

I Watched a 55-Year-Old Law Break the AI Hiring Industry — And It Was Overdue

The Eightfold AI lawsuit exposed what happens when companies treat employment decisions like ad targeting — and why the fix requires enginee

a bit more context

[therustyskull]

Curious now as to if my applications last year were filtered through this system. Some companies (like Adobe, Oracle, etc) should have jumped at my experience in lifecycle management but I either heard nothing at all or a form rejection weeks after applying.

[tlirsgender]

My most diagnosable take is that honestly. As much as people in social justicey spaces talk about exercising your empathy ... there's also value in being able to turn it off so you're not extremely susceptible to emotional manipulation. Sometimes you have to be able to recognize "oh, this is bullshit propaganda trying to tug at my heartstrings" and stop giving a fuck about like. Colonizer feelings or whatever. Vibes can't override your principles

[tlirsgender]

Like idk being niceys is a good start but your politics can't begin and end with 🌈 kindness 🌈 or you're gonna get taken advantage of. The worst people on earth will be like "but what if........ I have a sob story about it 🥺" & you Need to be able to tell them to Fuck Completely Off

[tlirsgender]

There's a certain strain of ... Everyone Is Valid 🌸 style pseudo leftism that ime invariably caters to whoever throws the biggest tantrum. And this is a Problem interpersonally & it's especially bad if you let these people dictate your opinions. Not everyone is valid some of you are racist

[gaydiation-poisoning]

It would kill half the 19-25 year olds online to realize "I can't help it I have trauma" is one of THE quintessential abuser excuses

[gaydiation-poisoning]

Like there is a difference between "My trauma creates impulsive urges and has changed my instinctive reactions to be irrational, I need to relearn shit." vs "I'm traumatized so I Can't Help It and you're not allowed to expect better of me"

[laterkiss]

i should've locked in when i was thirteen

[jellogram]

Johnny Eck was a performer from the 1930s who was born without any legs:

He's primarily known for appearing in the 1932 cult classic Freaks directed by Tod Browning.

However what I'm mostly obsessed with is this account of a magic trick he did with his non-disabled twin brother (text under the cut)

Like this is the funniest thing I've ever heard. Can you imagine

Wikipedia screenshot:

"In 1937, Eck and Robert were recruited by the illusionist and hypnotist Rajah Raboid, for his "Miracles of 1937" show. In it they performed a magic feat that amazed audiences. Raboid performed the traditional sawing-a-man-in-half illusion, except with an unexpected twist. At first Robert would pretend to be a member of the audience and heckle the illusionist during his routine, resulting in Robert being called on stage to be sawed in half himself. During the illusion, Robert would then be switched with his twin brother Eck, who played the top half of his body, and a dwarf who played the bottom half, concealed in specially-built pant legs. After seeming to have been sawn off, the legs would suddenly get up and start running away, prompting Eck to jump off the table and start chasing them around the stage, screaming, "Come back!" "I want my legs back!" Sometimes he even chased the legs into the audience. The subsequent reaction was amazing – people would scream and sometimes even flee the theater in terror. As Eck described it, "The men were more frightened than the women – the women couldn't move because the men were walking across their laps, headed for the exit." The act provided the perfect jolt by frightening people at first but then caused just as much laughter and applause. The illusion would end with stage hands plucking up Eck and setting him atop "his" legs and then twirling him off-stage to be replaced by his twin Robert, who would then loudly threaten to sue Raboid and storm out of the theater. Their act was so popular that they played to packed audiences up and down the East Coast."

[teaboot]

Easily one of the top 5 funniest things you can do as an identical twin

[forthegothicheroine]

I like to bring him up when talking at the museum about sideshow stars who were genuinely brilliant performers.

[valtsv]

"here's my original character, Man Who Sucks But Loves His Daughter Very Much" and it's a guy who worships at the altar of patriarchal violence and the woman he uses as an excuse and an effigy to absolve him

[valtsv]

well i think his daughter should tell him to kill himself

[bugwars]

It is imperative that the customer remain unaware that employees drink water, it frightens and scares them to think of an employee as having human needs

[dragon-in-a-fez]

if I see one more "why age verification is bad" post that doesn't even bother to mention that locking young people out of huge sections of the public sphere - literally the stated goal and primary impact of this shit - is wrong in and of itself I will simply start hitting people with bricks

[dragon-in-a-fez]

yes yes biometric data privacy blah blah adults can hypothetically by harmed by this too. what about the immediate and deliberate and not at all hypothetical harm to youth. why are you acting like a potential data leak about what your face looks like, which if it ever happened would at least be generally recognised as a problem, is a more serious issue than cutting millions of people off from information and community and public expression which is happening right now in the open with large scale support

[socialistfremenist]

[maudiemoods]

If life is a never ending loop of dirty dishes and laundry then that means life is a never ending loop of home cooked meals and comfy clean clothes

[darkspaceboytoy]

Opening wordle and immediately experiencing a miniature Tower of Babel as I forget every five letter word I’ve ever learned

[epiphainie]

people get so mad when you tell them that their lowbrow entertainment they enjoy is actually lowbrow

[epiphainie]

everyone wants their self-indulgent romantasy to be considered high literature and whatever new mainstream pop boy/girl to be treated as the next beethoven and their gay fluff show on streaming apps to be revolutionary art changing the world and like, they're not. and that's okay. i'm literally watching the stupidest show right now and it's fine. it doesn't have to be more.

[epiphainie]

there's also the argument of how pop culture used to be the trickle down from high culture for the longest time but now it's an ouroboros eating itself as access and willingness to engage with high culture have been systematically destroyed and diminished through the last decades so your popcorn flick moviemaker now only gets inspiration from other popcorn flicks when their foreparents used to actually read literally and see art of all kinds and your pop musicians used to listen to all sorts of new and old music rather than just their contemporaries/competition and maybe this absence of any sort of culture outside of our easy algorithms is why everyone's so defensive of what they passively consume and so attached to it as a part of their identity but that's a discussion for another day