Wandering Through Wonder

I'm 32 years old (she/her). This blog is really just a text post heavy mixture of anything I find interesting.

[ceruleanheaven]

religion is so fucking funny the world is just too beautiful there must be a higher entity behind all this. lets oppress women

[andyboops]

I don't think this person is on Tumblr but I absolutely have to show y'all this art from @marlataviano on Instagram:

Apparently these are not prints, but pieces cut by hand from old Frog & Toad books, so they have not been able to keep up with order requests 😭

[jessaerys]

hate when im reading and theres a word i dont know so i search it in the dictionary and its like: beuperer. noun. a person who beupers. i'll fucking kill you

[maryreadings]

obsessed with this silly tiger

[phossyjaw2]

injecting my annoying hopless birds with potion of shut the fuck up

[benditozorrito]

#straight up filling them like éclairs damn

[son-of-land]

Once again Avatar posting because I've never seen it pointed out how in S1E15 when they go ice dodging and they're going up against some rocks that they can't sail through (not without difficulty), Bato tells them to turn around and find another way, that Sokka (and the rest) have already proven themselves, that due to the attempted genocide (and successful cultural genocide) of the south Bato has likely never seen their ships how they could have traditionally been.

Noone can remember a time where the southern tribe had benders, where they had an actual bending culture. Where the hunts and the fishing trips and the foraging in the tundra and literally everything was accompanied by waterbenders. Throwing up snow or ice to block the route of an animal, gathering up fish and safely navigating sudden rapids, clearing and creating paths to local flora and strengthening ice sheets so noone fell in.

Sokka is the first of the Southern Water Tribe to relearn how to sail with a bender, to trust that they can navigate far beyond the capabilities of a rudder should they need to.

Katara brought bending back to the South, and Sokka matched it every step of the way (well,,,,, every step of the way post Kyoshi lmao) and I'm so,,,

I forgot just how autistic I am about this damn show

[electronicgallery]

Museum Asks People To Recreate Paintings At Home, Gets 30 New Impressive Photos

It appears that boredom lies behind the most creative ideas. That's why quarantine has produced some of the most entertaining activities. One of them is the Getty Museum challenge, that so many of you have already seen in our previous article here.

[delphinidin4]

Narcissus taking a selfie is the ACTUAL best.

[simplyclockwork]

These are REALLY cool

[shilyas]

condo stairway scene gets me every single time bc of the way ilya lingers. the way he takes way too long to tie his shoes & adjust his jeans, the way he stands for a moment even though his cab is definitely there & the way he teases shane as he slowly lowers himself to give the sweetest, most unhurried kiss goodbye.

[kiisaes]

everyone eat more vegetables NOW!!! and mention the last vegetable you ate in the tags so we're all on the buddy system. I'll start: bok choy

[penandinkprincess]

i know in my heart that shane is the most obnoxious sick person of all time

not because he's a baby a la classic man cold

but because he will AGGRESSIVELY try to pretend he is not sick

he is trying to gaslight others but ALSO himself

he has a gold medal immune system thank you he did NOT get taken down by ill pikeling spreading Elementary School Plague to him

not happening

as an itty bitty he lied so he wouldn't have to skip hockey, and that has NOT changed as an adult

his true toxic trait is that he WILL be typhoid mary in that locker room if it means he doesn't have to stay home and miss playing

the majority of the struggle when shane is sick is just making him ADMIT he is sick

[burritosong]

Tags via @penandinkprincess

[penandinkprincess]

also CACKLING about the way this looks on the outside.

like. no one else on the team understands Hollander Illness Behavior yet, so they're teasing ilya about being overprotective because shane is SO underplaying it and meanwhile ilya is just, "no, i am so fucking serious. get a medic and then call an ambulance."

and shane who is barely on this realm of existence and about 0.2 seconds from having Involuntary Floor Time is just, "don't worry :) i'll just take an advil or something :)"

WHICH IS NOT HELPING EVERYONE ELSE UNDERSTAND THE MOTHERFUCKING GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION, SHANE, NO MORE CONTRIBUTIONS AT THIS TIME FROM YOU, THANK YOU

[florientius]

alternatively: shane comes out to his parents. no mention of boyfriend. so best momager and agent of all time yuna hollander asks around, does some sleuthing, goes undercover online and surveys the land for the most successful queer hockey player other than her son. imagine her surprise when she discovers from multiple sources that ilya rozanov might be gay. she arranges ads and promotions and sponsors for shane and ilya to do jointly. she hopes they hit it off and get together - only the best for her baby ofc - and she not so subtly asks after ilya from shane when they have a joint thing or an event where they meet. she is hoping, manifesting, praying and buying spells on etsy to have the two best hockey players in her family.

meanwhile every time shane and ilya meet up they fuck nasty, and ofc shane does not understand why his mom suddenly become a bears fan...

[tinylilhollander]

During the post-cottage era when Ilya's still playing for Boston, Shane sends Ilya a text one night that's just like "Are you alone?"

And Ilya is like "No I'm out for drinks with the guys. Did you not see that we won, Hollander?"

And Shane texts back like "Of course I saw, that's why I'm texting." Then a few seconds later: "Download this app right now. Be discreet." with an app store link. And Ilya texts back like '??? 🤨 Shane, have you been hacked?'

And Shane is like 'Just download the fucking app, asshole. This is your reward. Username is Jane2481. Fucking HURRY.'

And when Ilya follows the link and finds out that it's the app that controls a vibrating butt plug, he nearly blacks out at the table before disappearing for a suspiciously long smoke break.

[tinylilhollander]

@zouisalmightie Aaahh no why would you apologise for leaving this masterpiece in the tags. Holy shitttt

Goddd the idea of Ilya being able to hear allll of it but not speaking to him. Just communicating what he wants from Shane through what he does with the plug until Shane gets it. Making Shane work for it in more ways than just making pretty noises for Ilya. Adding something of a puzzle to it. He knows Shane likes a challenge, and a challenge it's possible to win, and he creates one for him. Hottttt.

[sinmonger]

Hollanov + tweets (part 2)

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be a part of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

[snowsmoked]

I do think that Shane gets a Russian language tutor. He sees that Ilya is always having to think, speak, and translate in his second language. And he knows that Ilya is fluent by this point, but if he's serious about forever with Ilya (which he is) he wants Ilya to be able to communicate with his boyfriend in his native language. He also saw how much his grandparents struggled with learning English as adults and how much more expressive and talkative they were when they spoke Japanese at home together.

So he gets a tutor. He meticulously researches her (she's from Moscow, so he'll learn from someone with Ilya's same accent). She's signed to more NDAs than he can count. She has 10 years of experience, she's certified to teach English and Russian, and she has 4.8 stars on MyTutor.

Shane pays her a frankly concerning amount of money to make house calls. Twice weekly, unless he's on the road, she arrives at his apartment to teach him foundational Russian. She gives him workbooks, Russia cartoon recommendation, podcasts for beginners, etc. He tells her he's learning because his boyfriend is Russian and she outlines a course that focuses on domestic language first (as opposed to travel or business). She even teaches him what she calls a 'culture course' with lessons on Russian music, food, and various traditions.

She's only a few years older than Shane and he actually finds himself looking forward to her visits. At this point, she's the only person other than his parents that knows he has a boyfriend.

About 4 months in, Shane finally feels comfortable enough to ask about what he'd been very excited about learning.

"You want me to teach you how to talk dirty to your boyfriend?" Ekaterina raised an eyebrow.

"Um," Shane blushed. Was this a little too far? Was this inappropriate to ask of a tutor? "Yes? If - If that's okay, I mean."

A slow smirk spread over her face. "This will be fun. Fun for me, now. Fun for you, later."

"I made a list," Shane admitted. He wasn't going to back out now, he put a lot of thought into his list. He turned to it in his Russian notebook and handed it to her.

She scanned over it indifferently. "You will use all this in one night?"

"Yeah, probably. Is it too much?"

"It is good you have a Russian man," Ekaterina said. "They have good stamina. Mostly, anyway."

And while it was a little embarrassing for Ekaterina to correct his pronunciation of please let me suck your cock, it helped that she seemed just as comfortable with that as there is tea on the stove.

Though, maybe he shouldn't have learned those phrases at the same time, because Ilya will never, for as long as they live, allow him to forget asking, while down on his knees and with excellent pronunciation, please let me suck your tea.

[themauvesoul]

we must be honest with ourselves. ilya doesn’t have a domesticity kink. ilya has a deep and abiding desperate need for stability in his life. he grew up in a house where it was impossible to please his father, and his father’s moods controlled everyone and everything. his brother is an addict. he went into a career that is notoriously unstable. sure he’s playing in boston now, but tomorrow he could get traded to fucking tampa and there’s nothing he can do about it. he’s in the US on a visa that hinges on remaining employed in a sport where losing teeth and collecting concussions is a given. he’s never had a romantic relationship last more than like three days. the only person he can really rely on in his life is svetlana. and its like he said. everybody always wants more from him. more money, more effort, more time. its like he’s trying to build a house, but people keep stealing the lumber before he can even finish framing out the walls.

so. when ilya meets shane. a guy who is extremely easy to read. a guy who is a terrible liar. a guy with a routine for everything and a real estate fetish and a very neat investment portfolio. with his reliable british jeep and his practical athletic wear and his repetitive diet. guileless, responsible, predictable shane hollander, who has to be coaxed into asking for what he wants, who rarely ever asks for more than what ilya gives him, who asks ilya if he’s okay like he genuinely cares. AND he laughs at Ilya’s jokes, and has a wicked mean sense of humor that makes ilya laugh in turn, and rides that thang like he wants to die on it. like. Jesus Christ. Of course he fell in love with that. Of course his favorite thing in the whole wide world is shane nagging him about leaving his dirty socks next to the couch, or shane folding the laundry, or shane’s color-coded google calendar where he’s scheduled an hour-long block for sex every day. of course he loves leaving the socks out on purpose to piss shane off and add a little je ne sais quois to the sex that night. its like testing a mathematical equation that always spits out the same beautiful answer.

[twiststreet]

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.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)