[cleolinda]

Dolly Parton, country music icon, dies at 80

Her death came after Parton suddenly announced in May 2026 that she was canceling a Las Vegas show and said she’d been undergoing treatment

During her more than 60-year career, Parton sold more than 100 million records and won 11 Grammy Awards, making her one of the best-selling musical performers of all time.

[...] Parton was also a shrewd businesswoman who amassed an estimated $650 million fortune and maintained creative control in the cutthroat and male-dominated music industry. She presided over an entertainment empire that included the Dollywood theme park. And she was a devoted philanthropist who launched the Dollywood Foundation to provide poverty relief and fund educational programs in her native East Tennessee.

It's a long retrospective of her life, more than I can really quote here.

[sandmandaddy69]

[girlballs-archive]

[no-longer-another-bondi-blonde]

In 1990, the high school dropout rate for Dolly Parton's hometown of Sevierville Tennessee was at 34% (Research shows that most kids make up their minds in fifth/sixth grade not to graduate). That year, all fifth and sixth graders from Sevierville were invited by Parton to attend an assembly at Dollywood. They were asked to pick a buddy, and if both students completed high school, Dolly Parton would personally hand them each a $500 check on their graduation day. As a result, the dropout rate for those classes fell to 6%, and has generally retained that average to this day.

Shortly after the success of The Buddy Program, Parton learned in dealing with teachers from the school district that problems in education often begin during first grade when kids are at different developmental levels. That year The Dollywood Foundation paid the salaries for additional teachers assistants in every first grade class for the next 2 years, under the agreement that if the program worked, the school system would effectively adopt and fund the program after the trial period.

During the same period, Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995: The idea being that children from her rural hometown and low-income families often start school at a disadvantage and as a result, will be unfairly compared to their peers for the rest of their lives, effectively encouraging them not to pursue higher education. The objective of the Imagination library was that every child in Sevier County would receive one book, every month, mailed and addressed to the child, from the day they were born until the day they started kindergarten, 100% free of charge. What began as a hometown initiative now serves children in all 50 states, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, mailing thousands of free books to children around the world monthly.

On March 1, 2018 Parton donated her 100 millionth book at the Library of Congress: a copy of "Coat of Many Colors" dedicated to her father, who never learned to read or write.

[catmask]

one thing that was difficult for me personally to learn is to be okay with things being temporary. if i really liked working with a pen/other finite art supply, i'd avoid ever finishing it out of fear of it being gone. if i really liked a flavor of drink that i'd had, i'd stock up on it just to never lose it, and eventually grow tired of it.

i think this can tend to happen when you're not allowed the time/space to learn how to enjoy things at a healthier pace, when you've had a lot of loss in your life, for whatever reason... but i also think that modern day scarcity marketing preys on this fact knowingly.

i'm sure you've probably heard the 'burn the candle, use the nice dishes' phrase before, but my addition to that would be: if you don't ever use something out of fear of losing it, or you focus all your energy into maintaining it, you'll never learn to love it while it's here. candles lose their smell after not being burnt for 1-2 years, and ink dries.

the time will take it from you anyway, so it's better to learn how to say goodbye to something with grace than to avoid it all together.

[devilishdescent]

getting murdered but i can’t even afford the name brand stuff so im getting snawed in half and scrabbed to death and shit

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Painkillers are fucking magical.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

"Remind me later" button on the 'something is fucked' body notification system.

[gehon]

"Omg! Tumblr its so fun! Full of my favorite media and characters alike! I cant wait to see everything!"

The ad that appears under each 5 art pieces:

[3liza]

i put "thats right", one of the popular emotes from my discord, on BTTV for use on Twitch. enjoy

[3liza]

woke up this afternoon to find my discord discussing how far they have spread the That's Right emoji, which we originally saw the need for immediately when we launched our server in like 2020, so i whipped this up quickly in photoshop and installed it for us. please feel free to use it on your own discord or on twitch

let a thousand That's Rights bloom!!! my influence!!!!

[carbonatedgatorade]

thatsright now lives in the microsoft teams implementation running at my work @ a major washington hospital network. and also i’m pretty sure it’s in the sid meier’s civilization internal slack.

[3liza]

please help yourselves to upscaled version by @april and the That’s Wrong companion piece by (i think) db from the Talk Like a Pirate Day server

[reemillustrated]

[prokopetz]

If I had a table of ten equally-weighted random unique outcomes, how would I calculate the likelihood of someone having rolled all 10 at least once by N rolls?

In probability theory, this is known as the coupon collector's problem. It's a well-studied problem, so you should be able to find online calculators for whatever specific variation of it your use case requires; you can try this one for a start. The above-linked Wikipedia article covers the theory if you're curious why that formula works.

[prokopetz]

@rchrdbrrll replied:

I remember looking this up years ago because I wanted to know how long it was going to farm certain collections of components in Warframe.

An understanding of the coupon collector's problem is essential for fully grasping exactly how badly gacha games and "pay to skip the grind" MMOs are fucking with you.

[nitewrighter]

The most depressing combo of teen boys is "total piece of shit" and "kid who would otherwise be a pretty pleasant person but definitely got singled out by Total Piece of Shit in 5th or 6th grade and is now stuck with Total Piece of Shit as a best friend largely because of Sunk Cost Fallacy and because he's permanently associated with Total Piece of Shit by his peers."

[nitewrighter]

I don't know who needs to hear this, but you do not have to white knuckle this shit until college. Yes, it's painful and scary and lonely to break out of a relationship that hurts you and stymies you more than it benefits you, but the sooner you start setting boundaries for yourself and standards for how you want yourself and those around you to be treated, the better you get at building this skill as an adult. You do not have to keep hanging out with that asshole. You are under no obligation to save that asshole, especially when he consistently doesn't listen to you or acknowledge your wants and needs, anyway.

[tanadrin]

I hope there’s an afterlife so that whoever made this pot 2,000 years ago can brag that their cookware is so good it’s still usable literally millennia later. Something about this object being lost for centuries and then rediscovered, and being put (successfully) to its original purpose again is so pleasing to me.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Hanging round pets will have you saying shit like "what a sweetie little fluffy boy" and "you're so good at drinking water" and "you are a chicken".

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the descendants movies are so crazy because the premise is literally what if all of the disney animated movies happened at the same time and afterwards the Good Guys resurrected all of their villains to give them a life sentence on a penal colony island where the only natural resource is an unlimited supply of pleather

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

it's like 99% about how the kids of the various disney princesses® going to school together and having cellphones but also cruella de vil's bleach-haired bastard son is there. who even asked for cruella to be included. were the working class human protagonists from 101 dalmatians involved in the construction of the penal colony or did the dogs represent themselves. and how does cruella successful manage hobnobbing with three actual evil wizards. the series starts 20 years later so they can all have fuckass little kids going to school so maybe it's been long enough for those kinds of barriers to be broken down but it seems crazy that three genuine article practitioners of the dark arts let a woman whose main claim to notoriety was "failing to kill a vast quantity of puppies" into the friend group. and by friend group I mean a polycule barely a step above the grandparents from charlie and the chocolate factory in terms of functionality.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

in like the first 60 seconds you learn that after all of the disney animated movies happened at the same time all of the protagonists decided to merge their kingdoms into one mega kingdom and they democratically elected the beast, as in beauty and the, to be their Mega King who's more in charge than everyone else. the sociopolitical implications of all of the disney royalty deciding to surrender sovereignty to become The Empire of the Beast are kind of mind-blowing but it's hard to focus on that because new teenagers keep showing up and announcing "my name is Mo. you know, the daughter of Quasimodo?" I guess everyone defining themselves so strictly in terms of parentage and family line is sort of what you'd expect from a society that's basically structured the same was as game of thrones but christ.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the main plot of the first movie is that the 16 year old heir to the Empire of the Beast is about to be crowned god emperor while he's still in high school (why?) and reveals he has a bit of an abolitionist streak re: his parents' horrific penal colony. which is cool and all, it really seems like he must have had to fight against propaganda like a salmon swimming upstream to arrive at the conclusion that the penal colony is a little uncool. but also pretty immediately after he lets four villain kids into society maleficent's purple haired ne'er-do-well hits him with a love potion that leads him to unceremoniously dump his long-term girlfriend (baby sleeping beauty) in an extremely public spectacle after The Big Game. please my liege I know you're entranced by her purple hair and edgy spray painting but sleeping beauty is calling her bannermen to arms. this insult will not stand. also the effects of the love potion wear off almost immediately but he doesn't say ANYTHING and just lets his new gf keep sweating about having him ensorcelled until she brings it up herself, at which point he confirms that he's been aware for A While and is cool with her (successfully!!!) slipping him a magic roofie. they just keep dating and the only person mad about it is the girl who got dumped in front of the entire school.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the plot of the second movie is that maleficent jr is trying so hard to assimilate into normie culture (ie, being blond and wearing pastels) to be a good paramour to the new teen emperor that she has a nervous breakdown and runs away back to the penal colony. there she immediately finds herself beefing with ursula's daughter, who is big pissed that only four kids got to leave the penal colony and everyone else for left to rot. she decides to right this wrong by ALSO hitting the teen emperor with a love spell and gets /this/ close to successfully making him open the borders in front of everyone at prom before some bullshit circumstances happen and instead there's a fight between a giant cgi dragon and a giant cgi octopus girl. for the record the teen emperor is also not that mad about THIS love spell either and he does immediately concede that the octopus girl is a passionate community leader who raises valid concerns about his failure to follow through on his initial promise of amnesty for the children of the penal colony. he does get back with maleficent's daughter though, who has decided to be purple again to show that she now confidently lives in two cultures.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I've been talking a lot about maleficent's kid and you might be thinking "now what about the rest of her inseparable teen polycule" and I'm sorry to say that they simply are not getting as much sparkle as their colleague.

the evil queen from snow white's daughter has the next meatiest storyline, probably because these movies primarily exist to sell fashion dolls that can compete with mattel and they need kids to really like the girl characters. in the first movie she learns a very important lesson about how she doesn't need to act dumb to impress boys. in the latter two movies she becomes an independent business owner and by far the most politically savvy of the main 4, by which I mean she's the one vocally advocating for liberating the penal colony. she really grows into a very sweet and community-minded young lady and I liked her a lot.

cruella's son gets a dog in the first movie and an implausible heterosexual relationship in the second. in the third one he's just kind of there, although he does seem to have opened a sort of shelter for youths on the penal colony.

jafar's son who I haven't even mentioned yet is mostly there to be tall and do flips. in the first movie he learns that he likes sports more than stealing. in the second movie he forces the school fencing team to stop being sexist and let mulan's daughter join. crazy that sports are that sexist in a world where mulan and like presumably merida exist I guess but whatever. in the third movie he flirts with gaston's dumb-as-ham blond son for a few minutes and the two of them end up deciding to take a gap year and travel the world together which sounds fake but I swear to god is true.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

in the THIRD movie the sleeping beauty daughter decides she's sick of being nice and wants to go apeshitt and honestly she kind of eats it up. beating her requires teaming up with ursula's squid kid and her himbo pirate boys as well as maleficent jr's deadbeat dad who turns out to be hades. thanks to some dubious writing/acting/direction hades comes across as both very gay and like he's his own daughter's problematically older ex boyfriend. the vibes are all over the place and it's still definitely one of the stronger performances in these movies. anyway during this movie maleficent jr decides to permanently close the barrier to the penal colony to protect the empire of the beast because she's gone so model minority good immigrant that she's become a republican about it. everyone is understandably pissed at her about this when they find out but it's already the third act so they forgive her quickly and they end up bringing the borders down permanently anyway to the joy of all.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

there are two more movies but they're about a completely different set of characters and I haven't seen them yet so stay tuned I guess

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

what do you mean what's the lore on this what do these movies have to do with zendaya

[figuring-it-all-out]

Spooky season is closer than you think.

[glendathegoodone]

[enchantingcheesecakepersona]

[rosesonkittens]

I've always written everything by hand before typing. Staring at a blank word document doesn't inspire the words to come.

But a blank paper and a blue pen and the words come at a steady pace.

[panaeolus-fimicola]

Frontiers | Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the class

As traditional handwriting is progressively being replaced by digital devices, it is essential to investigate the implications for the human

aaaand here's a link to the paper :)

[aparrotandaqrow]

There's a pretty damning commentary on this paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517235/full

In short:

they didn't actually measure changes in learning; they measured theta waves which don't have a clear link to learning

They evaluated adults, not children

They didn't have participants do any encoding activities; they were mindlessly typing the same thing over and over

They didn't allow participants to actually type; they had them 'type' with one finger of their right hand, when there's plenty of evidence that using both hands while encoding information leads to increased brain activity.

They couldn't see what they were typing (no visual feedback), so any error-correction processes the brain would usually run were impaired

The handwriting part of the experiment was completely normal and representative of using handwriting to record information.

They didn't actually report the raw data or conduct any statistical analysis for the two parts of the experiment individually; only the differences between the two groups.

Honestly, that is....shockingly bad. Like I'm surprised this passed peer review and it makes me wonder about the journal. Of course educational science is a joke of a field anyway with little scientific rigour over the last 50 years, so maybe that's not surprising. But this sure as hell sounds like this researcher walked into this project already convinced that handwriting is better for children's learning than typing and screens, and then rigged an experiment to support that bias. If I were the editor I would retract the paper, not just include a link to the commentary.

[necropolistheatre]

"almost nobody outside of her field has read her paper" was a big red flag for me actually and I've been bothered by this study since I first saw this post. there's this intense urge to posit researchers with fringe ideas as being intentionally ignored. but no, this study was just done abhorrently. This is a bad study with ill intent and a biased design. Nobody was talking about this because there's nothing to talk about other than "these findings are unsound and unreliable."

And I don't wanna be too accusatory but I do worry about the way people who immediately ate this shit up view disabled people who require assistive speech devices. Like it's pretty clear this study was set up to imply that technology is making people stupid, and people who require TTS were not being considered, but that's kinda my point.

"typing lets your brain coast" is a crazy sentiment to so confidently assert. As someone who spends most of my time typing these days, I can assure you that I am actively thinking about what I'm writing as I write it, not just "coasting" on default scripts and assumptions. And when we look at the methodology of this study, well.... hunt-n-peck typing with a single finger from a single hand doesn't seem like "coasting" on anything it seems frustrating and unengaging.

And then, there's so many variables being ignored here. What about language differences? What about differing levels of grammatical skill and understanding? Why were children not part of this study even though the conclusion focuses on children's learning? Are the people engaged with the study trained in typing, which is in fact a skill that is learned over time and has structure and rules unto itself?

I think if you find it easier to start writing by hand on paper, than to start typing onto a blank word document, that is a personal mental barrier influenced by skill level and familiarity. I've been a writer my entire life and a blank paper versus a blank text doc are the same.

[headedoutleft]

beautiful women in my area named Extreme Heat Warning are trying to contact me