[soft-lovely]

nothing is as tender as annotating your favourite books. it’s like leaving a piece of your heart on the pages for somebody else to find.

[diabolicjoy]

you can start learning anything you always wanted at any point in your life. & how nice it is to remember that

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2023??

Cooking with flavor bootcamp (used what I learned in this a LOT this year)

Beekeeping 101

Learn Interior Design from the British Academy of Interior Design (free to audit course - just choose the free option when you register)

Video on learning to read music that actually helped me??

How to use and sew with a sewing machine

How to ride a bike (listen. some of us never learned, and that’s okay.)

How to cornrow-braid hair (I have it on good authority that this video is a godsend for doing your baby niece’s black hair)

Making mead at home (I actually did this last summer and it was SO good)

How to garden

Basics of snowboarding (proceed with caution)

How to draw for people who (think they) suck at art (I know this website looks like a 2003 monstrosity, but the tutorials are excellent)

Pixel art for beginners so you can make the next great indie game

Go (back) to school

Introduction to Astronomy (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Principals of Economics (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Introduction to philosophy (free college course)

Computer science basics (full-semester Harvard course free online)

Learn a language

Japanese for Dummies (link fix from 2022)

Ukrainian

Portuguese (Brazil)

American Sign Language (as somebody who works with Deaf people professionally, I also strongly advise you to read up on Deaf/HoH culture and history!)

Chinese (Simplified)

Quenya (LOTR fantasy elf language)

[anti-parent]

and i've talked about this several times before but nasa has published like all of their processes & procedures free for the public and those could very well be revolutionary for working class organizing both in the imperial core and periphery. learning how to generate requirements, break down problems, calculate and allocate resources, determine effectiveness of various interventions, establish traceability, maintain organizational knowledge, and so on. like if people fucking cared to use them we could avoid some of the most prevalent problems with working-class & anti-imperialist organizing in the US.

it doesn't cancel out the bad stuff by any means but it drives me crazy that people are like "oh they don't do anything for the public" when they won't use some of the most effective organizing technologies that they've put out for free!! and then they keep complaining about the lack of effectiveness of US leftist organizing. and i know all that's an outreach & education issue but you know what that's ALSO A FUNDING ISSUE! AGAIN!

[tsscat]

Do you have any recommendations for which resources to start with/how to approach them? Hopefully this is not too much of an ask, I’m just very curious about them and how to navigate them.

[anti-parent]

thank you for asking!

it really depends on your existing level of familiarity with engineering concepts.

the NESC academy has a ton of video lectures including a lot of basic stuff about models-based systems engineering (MBSE), which is the framework i mentioned in the original post that i think can be especially helpful in an organizing context.

knowledge management is huge in an organizing context. maintaining continuity and documenting info securely is really really important for orgs of all kinds (if they want to last lol).

the systems engineering handbook is a really comprehensive resource, though very jargon-y, and i'd recommend looking up concepts you're unfamiliar with as you go through it. i wish it was written more accessibly. but i use it a lotttt a lot.

the software engineering and assurance procedural requirements and standards, same deal as above. but it has a ton of good info on how to build & evaluate good software, and a lot of it can be abstracted to non-software projects an organization undertakes. i use a lot of these principles in my day-to-day organizing.

if you start going through any of these and have questions, or need more resources to learn the fundamentals, let me know and i'll try to help you out.

[coffee-without-anesthetics]

forgive me father for i have opened a notification and read the message within to make the red dot go away and then forgot to reply for a month . it will happen again

[demilypyro]

kill them with kindness

but kill them!

[ballroomnotoriety]

im sobbing

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I’ve seen this on my dash at least ten times now and somehow every single time I am once again unprepared for how the cat looks.

[sparkly-trashfire]

The Creature never fails to make me laugh.

[dajo42]

it felt like it was january for three months and now ten days of february have passed in what felt like about five hours. feels weird

[dajo42]

oh cool a post i made about time passing weirdly in february 2020. im sure the rest of that year felt normal though

[hetaari-deactivated20230325]

Mama Mia it’s-a Wednesday

[hetaari-deactivated20230325]

WRONG FUCKING IMAGE

[its-your-mind]

HAPPY MAMA MIA ITS-A WEDNESDAY WRONG FUCKING IMAGE WEDNESDAY

[adamsmasher]

WE WERE ON JEOPARDY!!!!!!!!!!

[rouge-the-bat]

thank you for coming to my this #mythis

[asthedeathoflight]

Resisting the urge to Um Actually this dragon novel because it has the dragon eggs be like three or four feet wide but there is simply a limit to how large hard-shelled terrestrial eggs can be. No matter how large the animal is, the embryo needs oxygen, and oxygen needs surface area. The larger an object is, the lower its surface area relative to volume, and the less oxygen the embryo can receive. We think of large animals as having porportionately large young because mammalian pregnancy has the unique benefit of allowing for the size of the young to scale with the adult because their oxygen is provided directly through the placenta, and almost all the megafauna remaining on Earth are mammals. But this is not the case for species which lay eggs! For fuck's sake even the sauropods hatched out of eggs barely larger than basketballs! Your hatchling dragon would be impressively enormous if it were the size of a house cat. Stop trying to make me believe that this (ROUND!) dragon egg somehow supplied enough oxygen to develop an infant the size of a large dog or even bigger. If it were possible the dinosaurs woulda been doing it!!!!

[achillbeing]

I love you /lh. Experts going off on their particular fascinating cool topics and adding unexpected context to things we take for granted is like my favorite thing this was delightful. Talk to me more about eggs and geometry and biology all you want :D

[achillbeing]

Amazing concept

[hesperocyon-lesbian]

Whistleblower drops 'largest ever' ICE leak to unmask agents: 'The last straw'

A Department of Homeland Security whistleblower has released the identities of about 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees Tuesday in what h

A whistleblower at the fascist DHS has released the names of 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol agents, providing an unprecedented means to monitor and counter their local presence

[kropotkindersurprise]

If you're an american, go check https://icelist.is/ to see if there's any ice/dhs/border patrol agents living near you.

[speedlimit15]

i think if your account has existed on this site for a certain number of years you should be grandfathered into ad free browsing. a decade seems reasonable like if you signed up in 2012 or prior you have tenure

[hickeywiththegoodhair]

Were you a victim of the Mishapocalypse? You might be entitled to compensation

[etchif]

Lol. Lmao even

[crystaltoa]

“ So it’s not the same species at all.”

“ Only if you use the scientific definition of species! However, if you use my definition that I just made up-“

[thisisnotwhathappens]

@crystaltoa Okay but this is even funnier than you're implying. Things to know: there are several species concepts (i.e. ways to define a species), the morphological species concept is just one of them. This person is arguing that species are just made up, so it doesn't matter if they define a species in a different manner than typically done, thus defaulting to the morphological species concept which is a real thing. The morphological species concept is just so old and outdated as to be unusable by scientists, unless they have no other option (looking at you, hominin fossil record). It's like, saying, "well, Koch's postulates (of germ theory of disease fame) isn't always useful anymore. However, the miasma theory-" It's crazy! I hate it!

Morphological species concept also leads to some of the whackiest species classifications!

So the guy on the left is a galago, a small lil cutie pie who is a primate. Middle guy? Chucky D. (Charles Darwin), a large primate. On the right? A tarsier, another small primate.

The commonly held assumption about these guys relatedness used to be that the galago and tarsier were pretty closely related, based on that morphological species concept. I mean, I can see it. Small, kinda mousey, big eyes, big ears? And that, duh, they don't look ape-ish at all! Gotta be pretty distant, huh?

Here's the thing, dear reader. WE ARE MORE CLOSELY RELATED TO THE TARSIER THAN IT IS TO THE GALAGO. The last common ancestor of the human lineage and the tarsier lineage is much more recent than that of the last common ancestor of the tarsier and galago, even though they look so similar!

There's hundreds more of these cases, I'm just a primate scientist, so that's what I reached for!

TLDR: The morphological species concept is one of several species concepts, but it's so basic as to be unusable, and that is the hill I will die on.

[torieisawesome99]

It's actually kinda nice to think of the lil tarsier as a distant funny lil cousin

[golden-letters]

bitch this is all you’re gonna get. this life, this face, this body. you better not ‘maybe in another universe’ your way out of everything. sit your ass down and face this. go make tea and have a picnic and read a goddamn book. kiss your loved ones, send that damn text, and hug your siblings. this is all you’re gonna get.

[catchymemes]

[pro-gay]

people reblogging this talking about the english language. fuck the english language. the fascinating thing here isn’t how you pronounce it, it’s his amazing teaching skills. monolingual people be quiet for once challenge

[geocaprican]

I really felt and shared her “Wow”

[cardstockcaster]

Man language is cool

[pusheen]