The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.
The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.
The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.
The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.
The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.
The Cool Binder Rule: by wearing clothes and accessories that are to your taste instead of trying to blend in, people will be more likely to compliment you and show interest in you as a person.
Heal Thyself (46902 words) by astolat
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Characters: Draco Malfoy, Narcissa Black Malfoy, Harry Potter, Luna Lovegood
Additional Tags: Healer Draco Malfoy, St. Mungo’s, Medical School, Hospital, Medicine
Series: Part 12 of Harry Potter works
Summary:
“Are you going for the course?” Lovegood asked. “You have the NEWTs.”
“What course?” Draco said, then, “No, don’t be ridiculous,” when he realized she meant the notice pinned up on the board he’d been staring at: Applicants To The Introductory Mediwizard Course For The Coming Term Shall Present Themselves In The Chief Mediwizard’s Office By August 24th.
“Oh, I thought you might,” she said. “Well, goodbye.” And off she wandered again in her addled way.
at this point i don't know if my wee band of followers are nart-smarties but we gotta talk about something less crushing for a second
i'm fixing to spoil your asses
the *brilliance* of this scene, that you can't get from bare context—
first of all, Naruto the series suffers from Typical Shōnen interminable length; atypical iconic phenomena, aka behind every generational touchstone is a tired mangaka pressured into extending the series beyond his planned climax; and
Naruto the character is in the wrong genre. check my 'rare media' tag, we were watching some of the actual ninja series which were bleak, nihilistic, bloody, to the point that when that overrated qt guy slapped on a semblance of a happy ending it actually twice-a-day'd the trenchcoat into a whole satisfying narrative cycle
anyway Naruto should not be in a ninja anything. he's a sanitizing ray of sunshine whose relentless positivity in this context translates into homoerotic obsession. even Sakura is more genre appropriate
(* the reason that everyone got fucked up over that other concurrent anime is because *that* guy died. he tried to shove his rays where the sun don't shine and the narrative claimed his ass. audience: 100% casualties. instant meme. that's what would've happened to Nart boy)
that all adds up to 100s of chapters of terrible pacing.
we don't got time for that. i can't rec it to newbs like that.
they sidelined him on a turtle during the biggest build-ups to the world war and are you kidding, i would rather watch another two dozen Goku-on-the-snake-highway than that, at least man was getting somewhere. Shippuden is too many stalls and they're not even filler episodes so you have to "pay attention"
but i tell you. we telling you. if Naruto had just been about these two losers.
bc, secondly, the silver-haired guy *is* from this genre.
Kakashi is Tired. from age fourteen he has nothing to live for. he's been tired since he was like, six years old. he is easily the best ninja of the village, and he has to teach these little pre-teen snot-rags.
he straight up tells those kids most of his friends are dead. this man is done like dry toast. he's not even thirty. it's worrying how many of our bisexual asses relate to him.
where i got on, where most of you are at least dinner-party familiar with nart is The Wave Mission. drunk bridge-builder. FUBAR. meaning of ninja life. et cetera. and that's where we find out Kakashi's mysteriously concealed left eye is actually a magic bullshit eye ...
... that was gifted to him by this dead kid who is the
reason
for his entire
existence.
Kakashi has very little impetus to keep going! (i see u and luv you gai fanatics). His whole oeuvre, his raison d'être is he's going to show this dead teammate the future through this eye.
except
except he's not dead
the dead kid isn't dead!!!
it's this guy!
who somehow has the other one of the pair of magic bullshit eyes!
and let me tell you, as much as Obito probably deserves a redemption arc, i cannot like him. he's annoying. obnoxious. his own identity issues are lies layered on amoral lies. he got the parents killed! who knew him and taught him and treated him like a little brother!
and yet he starts out as.... a little snotty ray of sunshine. what!
and then to turn around and reveal that he's a principal antagonist? hundreds of episodes after The Wave Mission. if i had stuck around for that, i would've lost my little mind. the speculation on unmasking 'Uchiha Madara', it was epic and internet-frothing. so many people were so wrong. they probably still don't know how to feel about that
i am a sucker for identity porn. and symbolism? oh my god???
get this! the only reason the top-secret location of the tragically young hot parents was revealed? was from Kakashi talking to Obito. to his gravestone!!! look at this one good thing the future has yielded! except it *was* to actual Obito, listening in, the only reason the entire. tragedy. which kicks off. the series. in the first place. the first five minutes of the whole thing! the turning point which kicks off the future!
all that because
that biome you're looking at is the inside of their magic bullshit eye
that's right. they are literally inside a dimension which only they can access. (we said it was magical bullshit.) they're inside their shared vision. ¡¡¡literally!!! this is their shared future that they're fighting it out on.
Naruto is already a mash-up of geeky fan shout-outs, driven by an undercurrent of loathing of dysfunctional rural japan, so to take all the bullshit OP eyes godmod multi-campaign world-ending war, and drag it back screaming into the OG tragic ninja post-war genre?
holy shit
hoooolleeee
did they have to go that hard ?!!!!
if they had trimmed to actually build up to this can you. imagine
and that's not even the top anime betrayal
there's like three more betrayals after this one
if i had just known about this subplot at the time? i would've been on this like white on rice. the fucking pay-off. the fucking chekov's gun strapped to their faces. for hundreds of pages?!
look at them
no more identities, no more copies, no more chances
no way out except through their own eyes
clad in their emblems—the misdirections, the killing blows, the *copying*
existential battle.
now
without having to slog through all those chapters
you are free to watch
Obito symbolically yank away his younger self *from the seal of reconciliation*
someone asked me in an art class I'm teaching what they should spend their practice time on / which subskill is most worth developing. I gave some boring classic answers and then after a few exchanges abruptly came back to the question to say, you should draw stags.
Stags are nice to look at, they have distinctive antlers that are hard to mess up, and their limbs don't have that many degrees of freedom. it'll probably take you 50 (??) hours of studying and drawing stags from many angles and positions to get to a point where you can doodle a good one from imagination whenever you're bored.
I think being able to draw one visually interesting subject will give you a sense of mastery, and a visceral belief that you could do this with any given subject.
epistemic status: I made this up. I have no idea if it's true. (I flagged this upfront to the student.) But if you try it out, let me know how it goes!
Coincidentally came across a taxidermied stag at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris so I had a quick go at sketching and inking it.
There's a few different types of fur to try and capture, like in the ears versus under the chin or on the flanks, and the antlers, hooves, and face add some more contrasting textures. (Another perk is that most people don't have much visual exposure to stags so failures of proportion are less obtrusive.)
for those wondering why they're free to take now, it's because the company that made those "chicken soup for the soul" books bought them a few years ago and then completely collapsed so bad they couldn't afford to dispose of or even take the blu rays and dvds out of their kiosks all over.
so any of them is free game because they're all located on other business' property and they usually don't want to have to pay to get rid of them either. so asking the store manager usually gets you the ok to pull it out and keep it.
there was a period of time right after their bankruptcy where you could put in any debit or credit card and it would spit out movies without charging you. you could even put in like an expired or deactivated card, or a visa gift card with a $0 balance, didnt matter, they'd just start spitting discs out. a lotta people raided redboxes for movies for a couple months, with some people doing what me and my brother and my dad did here, taking the whole box and signs and marquees as well. because managers sure as hell don't want a big abandoned piece of trash on their sidewalk disappointing customers. BUT they're also often too cheap to pay someone to remove it. so they just sit there.
luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).
the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.
there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.
if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.
remember: the rules are made up. act like you belong there and you can get away with anything. this applies to your own life
A major difference things like this don’t take into account is animation.
When the original pokemon were designed, they were just static six-bit colorless sprites. They had no clue what was to come in the next 20 years.
Over the next twenty years, pokemon has become insanely popular. Disney level popular. Each game has increased the animation until each one now has a fully animated CG model, rendered in far more detail than the first gen Gameboy sprites could ever dream of. It’s had thousands of cartoon episodes and around two dozen movies.
The newer designs are-
Much easier to animate, and more importantly,
Significantly easier for children to draw.
And that’s ultimately what this franchise boils down to: it has to be accessible to children.
Post Dark Side of Dimensions. I am 100% kaiba didn't time travel, he went into the land of the dead. No one ever said time travel. Anyways, shenanigans.
My favouritest sport fact ever is that in 1990s 2 cardiac surgeons watched an f1 race to save the lives of countless kids. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) kept losing the lives of patients after successful heart surgeries. Specifically the 10-15 minutes after a bonefide clinically successful surgery patients would die:
And so the two surgeons filmed a handover after heart surgery and sent it to the Ferrari pitcrew who were told to critique and improve handover process
And from this:
we got this:
The error rate during patien handovers dropped from 30% to 10% with the F1 informed protocol.
I literally love this fact so much because being an pitcrew member is such a thankless job because theyre underpaid and overworked mechanics and they literally saved lives in this instance.
Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital turned to Formula 1 for answers. By studying Ferrari’s pit-stop teamwork, they redesigned how patien
I love this!
And it that it wasn't a one and done.
The doctors went to the race tracks to watch the car changes and the pit crews went to the hospitals and watched a live transfer and offered suggestions and they kept working with them to improve.
After there was a successful improvement of the most vital metrics of a handover of a patient from surgery to ICU, the pit crews also worked with other hospitals for other procedures and it's now a whole thing of trying to apply the specialized, streamlined and speedy teamwork and nonverbal coordination of pit crews to other high-risk fields.
This is a perfect example of how two very different fields of knowledge meeting can make a huge leap forward in progress.
This comic is a little different than what I usually do but I worked real hard on it—Maybe I'll make more infographic stuff in the future this ended up being fun. Hope you learned something new :)
If you are still curious and want to learn more about OCD, you can visit the International OCD Foundation's website. I also recommend this amazing TED ED video "Starving The Monster", which was my first introduction to the disorder and this video by John Green about his own experience with OCD.
The IOCDF's website can also help you find support groups, therapy, and has lots of online guides and resources as well if you or a loved one is struggling with the disorder. It is very comprehensive!
Reblog to teach your followers about OCD
(But also not reblogging doesn't make you evil, silly goose)
I Like Imagining A Never Christianized England Where The Druidic Priests sound Exactly Like COE Vicars
*droning* “Hail Sulis, queen of the harvest, blessed is thy holy light, we ask you to accept this goat as a sign of our reverence to your power and benevolence”
“Do remember that the spring fete is coming up and we will be drawing lots for the sacrifice on the next full moon, additionally there will be a cream tea to benefit the stone circle maintenance fund this coming Wednesday, and we must remember to thank Mrs. Springfield for providing several of her excellent cakes”
This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.
They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.
And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.
If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.
Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.
A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.
Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"
So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.
No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.
Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up
I don't understand why all these characters are surnamed Kong. It appears to reflect some kind of-- like not ALL the apes are named Kong, so it has to mean something, no??
OK this passage is goofy in numerous respects but I want to set that aside for a minute and just focus on one thing: "Speef" will always sound like a sound effect, but it's better if you spell it "Spief", right?
This is one of the things I find most peculiar about English: doubled vowels are connotatively infantile, despite being extremely common and the normal way to represent certain sounds which aren't themselves seen that way. It's not the sound at all, it's just the fact that the vowels are doubled! You'll observe that it only applies to digraphs and not to diaereses like "cooperate" or "vacuum". With core vocabulary this fades into the background, but it leaps out with unfamiliar names or words. That's why the British colonial use of "oo" to represent "u" sounds in non-European languages comes off as disrespectful, and (beyond the uncanny-valley effect) it's why English speakers perceive Dutch orthography as inherently ludicrous.
This is insane, right? There's nothing meaningful about whether a digraphic vowel uses two different letters or the same one twice, and as far as I can tell the sounds represented by -ee- and -oo- are totally arbitrary. This isn't written down anywhere and nobody teaches it to second-language learners, it's just this vague vibe you acquire from immersion. What the hell happened there
