Things tend to fall apart, while they are falling into place. Learning to accept everything that comes my way. First year teacher just taking it one day at a time.
I have been seeing a lot of writing advice lately, and I really have to butt in to give you perhaps the only writing advice I think is valid.
1. Pay attention to your own patterns. Find out what is in common between times when you are doing your best work.
2. Create an environment where those common patterns happen on purpose.
3. Profit.
Try things that other people say worked for them, sure. They might also work for you, or they might illuminate places where you can refine your process, whatever. But ultimately, find what works best for you and do it on purpose. And also be aware that your creative environment isn’t just things like outline vs discovery vs zero draft, it’s also things like “my desk isn’t very comfortable so I don’t like sitting there” or “I hate being alone so let me go to a cafe or do a virtual coworking session” or “work is tiring and afterward I only want to be horizontal so let me make it easier to write on my phone/store a notebook and pen beside my bed/etc”
ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds
I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study
after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines
et voila
and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)
my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on
this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏
BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos
the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise
ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!
Also thank you everyone for your kind words and support throughout this whole process, it's been a genuine treat thinking there are potentially thousands of you out there cheering me on while I paint this 🥹
we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos
the 16th is looming in the distance so i'm trying to get thru these as quickly as i can so i can have as much time for the GBH as possible. i still need to do the names next to all of them so i've got about a week and a half to finish everything which is GREAT because i have adhd and nothing gets my ass in gear like a fuckin deadline, let me tell you
power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,
the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis
and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.
Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp
thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
I wish they made it even marginally possible to get a job like I’m so fucking sorry I don’t have a rare but also highly demanded skillset, an agreeable disposition, and the ability to survive off of three nickels a week I’m soooo sorry
IF YOU CAN’T GET A JOB, IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!!!!! THE SYSTEM IS DEEPLY BROKEN!!!!!!!!
The hiring process has never been great, but in the past couple of years it’s hit rock bottom. Ghost jobs probably outnumber real jobs on job sites. Recruiters and HR use AI which throws out 90% of resumes before a real human being sees them. And most companies are hellbent on holding out for a unicorn candidate- meaning someone who already knows how to do the EXACT role without any training while also accepting entry level wages- instead of investing in new people.
It’s fucking hard out there right now. You are not alone and it’s not your fault if you can’t get hired.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
So no one is going to tell me that they made looking for alaska into a miniseries in 2019????????? I'm so watching this after Merlin. I haven't read John Green in years and this is going to be cringy and amazing
[ID: a series of tweets by @/SketchesbyBoze they read:
"I review books for a living, and I’ve noticed a worrying trend of what I call “instagramming the Holocaust.” (1 / 9)"
"Bestselling novels about the Holocaust tend to be “uplifting” and sentimental. They have romantic subplots. Jewish characters only exist to be rescued by the (often American) protagonist. The cinematic, three-act structure culminates in a redemptive ending."
"What these books offer (and they sell in the millions) is a sanitized version of the Shoah in which brave Americans bravely battle Hitler, the reader learns a lesson about Kindness and Not Being Prejudiced, and there are no sticky questions about who did the killings, and why."
"Jewish novelist Dara Horn has observed that memoirs and novels written by actual Holocaust survivors typically don’t sell—because there are no pat resolutions, no redemptions, no heartwarming moments where the Jewish prisoners see the good in their Nazi captors."
"Anne Frank’s (excellent) diary became the entry point into the Holocaust for most of us because she had not yet experienced the worst of it – because she hadn’t yet learned that some people aren’t “truly good at heart.” It’s just safe enough not to disturb us."
"And we love “uplifting” Holocaust novels because we don’t want to be disturbed, not really. This is the real reason why books like Maus offend the sensibilities of middle-class parents, because they bear witness to a truth about human nature that we don’t want to confront."
"And the “message” of the Holocaust is not that people are truly good, or that we need to be kind and tolerant (though that is true). The message is that six million people were murdered, and millions of ordinary folk were complicit, and millions of others looked away."
"This compulsion to sanitize the past, to sanitize the world, is one of the overlooked roots of white nationalism. We want to seal ourselves away from the experiences of others because we fear what they might say to us. We want reality to be pastel-hued and instagram-filtered."
"If you feel the need to shield your children from history that’s upsetting and “inappropriate,” examine yourself. If you need your stories to have positive morals and tidy endings, examine yourself. If you live in a pastel bubble, examine yourself, because the bubble is toxic." end ID.]
"I wish we met sooner" is such a gentle sentiment. I love you so much I not only want you in my future, but in my past too. I want to have known you when we were small stupid kids, have held hands together as we played outside. I want to have stressed out over exams together, nudging a mug of still steaming hot chocolate against your elbow to get you to focus. I want to have told you I love you before I did anyone else. I want to have held you in my arms when all those sad memories you describe to me were still fresh wounds. I want my past to have been full of you, and full of meaningful memories with you. I want my past lives to have been spent with you, whether as two lovers, or two housecats cuddling by the fireplace on a snowy day, or two flowers that just happened to bloom on the same day, next to each other. I want to have consumed your existence and intertwined it with my own since my birth, never to be separated from you for a moment. I want to have loved you throughout it all, for all time.
The researchers emphasize that this does not mean microplastics are not a real problem.
“We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none,” said McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering, and the Program in the Environment. “There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem.”
Please don’t think that this means microplastics aren’t something to be concerned about.
tbh a lot of my advice boils down to “hey you know that terrible horrible looming thing you’re doing your best to avoid and distract and escape as much as possible but no matter what you do it just keeps looming and looming and ruining your life”
I have a wild idea. what if we supported our claims of fact by linking to a reliable source. better yet, what if we went hogwild and just straight up linked to the actual unpaywalled study
it is a truth universally acknowledged that no one single book printer across the globe uses the same cover template sizing despite the books being the same fucking size.
And you will spend hours tweaking everything in GIMP because FUCK Adobe, only for them to turn around and tell you it's still not right.
I think it's the language barrier but I don't understand what you mean by "cover template sizing"
Also books are not the same size, at least in France there is no standard sizes for books, there's no standard paperbook or hardcover sizes. The sizing and dimensions of a book depends on the publisher, the collection, and what the printer is able to make
Also yeah fuck Adobe... I hâte that it is the standard in the publishing sector, and I especially hate that there no real good open source alternative to a software like InDesign. As an editor I tested some and every alternative to it was just shitty, very hard to work with, limited and not optimal for working with a whole book
So there are some industry standards, especially if you are catering to indie/self publishers who are trying to hit the global market because we have a select few distributors who will work with indies.
It’s actually kind of a thing: you can spot indie self publishers because they do have a specific size they’ve been pushed into by the industry because those are the places that give us access to the global market.
(It used to be you could also tell who was self pub based on paper quality, because self-pub authors tend to opt for nicer paper quality to look more professional, while trad-pub goes for thinner, less white paper.)
Indie trade paperback are usually uniform sizes, as are hardback. The only major variable is usually the spine width due to page count, paper weight, etc
Which is taken into account by the printer when they generate a template for you to fit your cover design into. This step is usually automated by a computer.
So they generate the template based on whether you’re doing paperback, hardback and what your page count, paper weight, etc is. You make your cover wrap fit the template. You follow their guidelines exactly.
And then, very nearly every time the thing that scans your upload will tell you it’s wrong. Where is it wrong? Couldn’t tell you, chief. It’s just wrong.
Okay, so you try again, once again using the template they generated for you. If you’re me you’ll have emailed customer service by this point to ensure the automated template is correct. It is. The computer didn’t make an error. You did. Where’s the error? Guess :)
If you’re lucky it’ll work the second time. What did you do differently? No idea. You just fiddle-fucked with it slightly and now it works despite following the exact same outline as before.
And then you have to do this across multiple platforms for mass distribution because everyone has different printers that require different things. Sometimes 3-4 times depending on which markets you’re trying to reach.
And then some of the front cover will still wrap around onto the spine or be printed crooked. So then when you do reprints you alter your cover design to stop that happening.
And then they’ll change their printing specs again and not update the template generator. Rinse, repeat, lose your mind about it on Tumblr for a bit. Try again.
Credit card companies will TRY to saddle you with this kind of debt by the way - if ever a loved one dies and you are not co-signed on their credit card, do NOT agree to pay their debt unless you ask a lawyer first if you truly have to.
They will say “don’t you want them to go to the grave without debt”, they will try to guilt you, they will take advantage of your vulnerability.
Source: when my father died, he had some credit cards that my mom wasn’t on that she had no access to. The companies contacted her while she was sorting through the bills and getting a handle on how to run the house alone, badgering her with his credit card debt.
She wasn’t liable for any of it, but if she had ever agreed to pay before finding out that she didn’t need to, she would have been considered to have taken on his debt and would have HAD to pay it. It’s slimy, it’s predatory, and it’s entirely legal for them to do this.
Never accept the credit card company’s word about your obligation to pay anyone else’s debt, if you don’t have access to the card, ask a lawyer before agreeing to anything.
it is very interesting to see the language of contemporary book criticism co-opted by Christian Nationalists to remove books from English classroom and libraries.
One recent example: My novel Turtles All the Way Down was banned from being taught in English classes because one school board member claimed it "romanticizes mental illness."
(It does no such thing, of course. TAtWD makes mental illness seem really unpleasant and not at all either lowercase-r or capital-r romantic. To acknowledge something's existence is not to romanticize that thing. But part of co-opting this language is misusing it for the end of removing books thematically centered on mental illness, or physical illness, or sex, or anything else that might be deemed insufficiently inocuous for Educational Literature.)
But the question of when writing about something veers into romanticizing it IS actually a very important question for contemporary literary criticism, and one that's been explored a lot (sometimes with generosity and care, sometimes not) in book discourse online. So the Christian Nationalist Right is using the language of analysis that we are using in ways that are at best misguided and at worst disingenuous.
It's really discouraging--I mean, on a personal level obviously but also just as an American who believes teachers should be allowed to teach--to see such widespread book bans in American high schools and libraries. But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order.
On that front, the Christian Nationalists are right to worry. Books can be a path into loving one's neighbor as one's self, and seeing the full light of the sacred in the experiences of the marginalized. God forbid.
Babies don't misbehave, they just behave. There's no such thing as a baby being "bad" because they don't understand cause and effect at first and have no concept of others feelings for a while after they do learn that.
A baby is never doing something to upset you. They don't act up to piss you off. They act in the only way they know how, and yes, sometimes the behaviour they're drawn to isn't great! That's why you guide them and comfort.
It's okay to be mad, but you need to remind yourself of this or you'll become resentful. Babies don't misbehave.
Yeah sure Tumblr is a hellsite but I know someone who wrote a fanfic in the 1990s that someone else didn’t like, so when she was selling printed copies of the zine with the story in it out of her hotel room at a convention, this other woman STOOD IN FRONT OF HER DOOR TO REFUSE PEOPLE ACCESS. Because the story featured a ship she disliked. And I feel like somehow, 10,000 Tumblrs still can’t compare to that level of Extra.
I’ve actually heard about this event [or a similar event, which I can believe] from someone who was trying to get into the room to either buy the zine, or visit with the writer, or just see what was going on [idr]. Apparently it was quite the talk of the bar that night, and resulted in several heated [re: drunken] debates over whether Door Stander was violating Writer’s free speech, or if removing Door Stander would have violated Door Stander’s free speech.
Me, at the time, a 19yo with very little understanding of the law: “I mean…was it?”
Fandom Friend, who was a 40-something lawyer: “I’ll tell you the same thing I told everyone in that bar. No one was violating anyone’s free speech. Bitch was just being rude, and worse, obnoxious about it. You ever act like that in public, be aware you’re not changing anyone’s opinion. You’re just giving them a brand new opinion about you.”
It was a very formative conversation in my young adulthood.
Same person also told me to never mix coke and acid. Which was also pretty solid advice.
New Beginnings @teacherthingsandmore - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
