Conscience doth make cowards of us all

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." - John Keats ♪♫ Canada. I'm Kaitlyn; I have (not-so-) slight obsessions with several things. I drink too much coffee, want to see too many places, do too many things, listen to too much music, and...

[newyork]

Monument Valley, Arizona | Photographer: Adam Attoun

[english-history-trip]

NO. BAD algorithm.

[sawasawako-archived]

unpopular opinion but i think a lot of the things that people think are “pretentious” aren’t actually pretentious - they just require a little more effort & intentionality on the reader / viewer’s part to understand. but bc we’re so used to mass produced media and instant, consumable content, we’ve come to take for granted that knowledge & information can be instantaneously grasped, digested and absorbed without any real participation or action from us. if people were actually looking to criticise pretentiousness, they would call out the classism & racism of ivory tower intellectualism and its cultural manifestations, not whine about how “inaccessible” media that don’t treat their audience like idiots are

[cundtcake]

[chibisquirt]

58 seconds to demonstrate EXACTLY why professionalism requires manners.

[digitaldiscipline]

For those of you who do not speak Corporate, this is just:

“Fuck you.” “Fuck you, too.”

[twyllodrus]

“The traitor carrying this letter was from one of the theatres. It surpriseth me not.”

Jamie Campbell Bower as Christopher Marlowe in Will, 1x01 (2017)

[chaoticgouda]

shipment officers, gently nudging Ever Given with their 8 tugboats: Ever Given move out of the way please so you don’t block the entire global trade

Ever Given, her lamplights enormous: you SHOVE ever given? you shove her hull like the big boulder? oh! oh! no commerce for human! no commerce for human for One Thousand Years!!!

[vympr]

look at these beautiful artistic impressions of the new planet discovered by a 17 year old three days into their NASA internship

[moonlight-at-dawn]

Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

Because people confuse “critical as in critical thinking” with “critical as in criticizing something,” so they think that “look for something bad, no matter how far-fetched” is what “being critical” means.

[prismatic-bell]

They also don’t realize that “literary criticism” means…

Okay. What literary criticism IS, is like taking a mechanical clock apart to see all the gears and learn how it fits together and approach your next clock with more knowledge of what makes it tick.

What they THINK literary criticism means is, you take the clock apart and beat all the pieces with a hammer, then scream at it because it doesn’t tick for you the way it used to.

[izhunny]

OMG SOMEBODY PUT IT IN WORDS

[luisonte]

New York. Martes.

[thedaytodaylifeofafangirl]

I’m sorry but there is nothing more aggressively New York than that guy climbing over the rail to get to the subway faster while ignoring megafauna pizza rat

[moonpresenced]

@spookoii

[unheardmelody]

sigh I like never use tumblr anymore but sometimes twitter is just a little too personal

I feel like I’ve hit this really weird wall-ish thing where I’ve at least partly subconsciously started blaming a lot of my problems on not going to therapy, ‘cause at least twice a week I say I need to go to to therapy

but I don’t go to therapy, it’s not really an option just due to time and money (and money and money) and the effort to find a therapist 

but I feel like I’ve just started using this as an excuse to stagnate in any kind of growth or progress because tbh I should’ve been in therapy ten years ago but I was flat-out against it and so I just... started struggling through and working through stuff on my own

but now I’m tired of doing that on my own. and I want to do that in therapy. but getting therapy feels like more effort than it’s worth so I just. eh. 

anyways transference and hyperfixation are great coping methods that clearly have at least done something for me in the past so I guess I’ll just keep going with that 

[btterflyarchive]

[atheist-xmas]

I hate driving because you have to do everything perfectly as fast as possible or everyone around you will announce their displeasure with airhorns

[atheist-xmas]

oh and if you mess up you die and kill a bunch of people at the same time

[atheist-xmas]

LITERALLY like disarming a bomb except there’s a peanut gallery watching you and they’ve each got an airhorn and also another bomb

[atheist-xmas]

#this sounds like something John mulaney would say 

This is one of the nicest compliments I’ve gotten about my writing, and I’ve been reading this post in his syntax ever since I read your tag

[flawlessgentlemen]

Ben Feldman photographed by Collin Stark for Man of Metropolis (2016)

[mentalisttraceur]

Language-Free Thought

People usually think they think with language.

I don’t think with any language. I have raw thoughts, and one layer of those thoughts is my mind reflexively trying to fit the main thoughts into language. I’m pretty sure that everyone’s mind works like that. It’s just hard for many people to introspect this.

Noticing the wordless essence that precedes language or the process that converts it requires either the struggle of wording something, or really mindful, meditative attention to our mind.

Worse: Cognition that can be worded is rewarded. If we can repeat it, to ourselves and to others, and others can repeat it to us, it is reinforced and spread. Since words help anchor and index cognition, it is easier to hold onto and recall.

Language-free thinking is hard - our mind will insistently and uncomfortably pull away from thought which does not fit words. The results are often stuck in our head, so it can be frustrating and lonely.

Language-free thought is rewarding, however: it lets us think beyond the limits of our current language and it makes us better, more capable minds as a result.

[kxowledge]

V interesting

I’ve reflected on this in the past – and I’m rather aware of it, especially when it comes to studying, but even more so when it comes to language learning.

I first encountered this as described in a paper (in The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Studies I believe) as concept thinking, which resonated immediately with me. I don’t rembember the specifics of the study (unfortunately I don’t have access to the book anymore), but I believe that it argued that a higher concentration of bilingual people described their mode of thinking in terms of concepts rather than words. I was surprised to read that apparently not everyone thought in concepts. So, it was something I associated with being bilingual (because I don’t remember what was it like to not know a second language) with concept thinking, because intuitively it made sense. Thus, I found your assertion that this is the standard mode of thinking for everyone except they are not aware of it very intriguing.

This raises various interesting questions: are multilingual people more aware of the process? Does language learning foster reflection on language itself? And do people really believe they think with language?

Intuitively, I believe it makes sense that bilinguals are more aware of this. When thinking about things in your native language (and in any language you reached true fluency in), you think about the concept e.g. you don’t think of ‘apple’, but you think of an apple in its essence. (ah… wait….. I see where Plato was going with this……) However, when thinking in a different language you are still learning, you think of the word itself. So in our example before you would first think of the apple in general, then went to the word apple, then to the equivalent word in the foreign language. The key to fluency is to solidify the link between the foreign word and the thing itself, which is why it’s so important to learn words from context and engaging activites, whereas solely studying flashcards won’t get you to mastery (it will however give you the foundation you need to do the former).

Another – perhaps stupid – example from my personal experience. When I moved to the UK, I was practically a native speaker in my pronunciation and knowledge. You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in a great variety of settings. However, I always struggled in the kitchen because that was vocaboulary that I had learnt by heart during elementary school and never used myself, so I often struggled with the word ‘aubergine’ and ‘courgette’ – both were unfamiliar to me and not connected to the real thing. It was only with time that the connection solidified.

Another day-to-day activity where this is evident is studying: I understand the concepts, but this isn’t the same as being able to word them. In order to do that, I have to do focused practice.

& Another activity again for me was maladaptive daydreaming. While it’s a habit I almost got rid of completely, I notice now how I had two different ways to go about it: one where language didn’t matter, one where it did (so one is more like creating a world in your head for you to live in, while the other one is creating that world for you to narrate it).

This is only marginally relevant to your post, but I thought it was very interesting.

[unheardmelody]

people: what do you want for christmas??? me, internally: therapy. and my wrist fixed, surgically or otherwise me, aloud: uhhh, a pasta maker?

[seaoflove]

some of my favourite vídeo essays about art history:

whose migrant mother was this? the story of the native american woman who became the face of the 1930s depression (and got almost nothing for it)

bauhaus design is everywhere, but its roots are political how even a simple choice between what font to use can be a political act

edvard munch: what a cigarette means munch + tobacco = art? (yes we’re still on the topic of art as a political weapon)

art that was never finished how great masters sometimes even didn’t finish stuff. also! the history behind the colour aquamarine

fka twigs on mary magdalene (if you like asmr you’re gonna love this)

having a coke with frank ohara (technically not art history but this video is too good for me not to mention)

video postcard: woman at her toilette a quick dive into my favourite painting of woman impressionist berthe morrisot

this documentary about georgia o´keeffe (that ive seen about 10 times)

david hockney on vincent van gogh on love of nature, beauty, attention, and the art of looking (essentially a mary oliver poem in interview format!!!!)

[redditfront]

[rincewitch]

there’s so much going on here