jenvanmeter:

withasmoothroundstone:

neurodiversitysci:

Los Angeles graphic designer Emily McDowell, who survived Hodgkin Lymphoma, designed the snarky cards she wished she could have received. They’re called “Empathy Cards.”

“The most difficult thing about my illness was the fact that it was so lonely,” she says. One of the reasons was “friends and family either disappearing because they didn’t know what to say or well-intentioned people saying the wrong thing. So one of the most difficult things about being sick was feeling really alienated from everyone that I knew.”

These make great gifts for people with chronic illnesses.

(They’re also a great reminder that the average neurotypical person can’t “mind read”).

Yay!

Reblogging because even better with the additional context.

(via cognitiveinequality)

beckiboos:

knightofleo:

final-girl-cas:

guerrillatech:

Holy shit that’s so cool

Finally “do you love the colour of the sky” got compressed for our convenience

(via alepresser)

solar-sunnyside-up:

How to start building your social village–

How do you go from isolated to being apart of a properly connected social circle?? How do I go from that isolated individual to an actually connected person without having to force myself out to be a regular at a club or something??

Pick the most used social media across all your connections (for my this is sadly Facebook but I’m sure you could do this through discord or some other site I’m like 90% sure this is transferable in some formate maybe other ppl could pitch those ideas tho-) and then add everyone you know! And here’s the fun stuff you could do in your group!

Functional ideas Village Group for-

• Offer to swap babysitting/chores/errands or even buddies for these things
• Offer to exchange sale/coupon/bulk buying info (A good example of this is a have a friend who knows a butcher and so her family once every 2 months bulk orders from him directly and it’d WAY cheaper for everyone)
• Holiday organizing
• Dinner party ideas/hang outs (know 2 or more ppl who like sewing? Organize a dinner once every few months and watch a movie and sew! Do a book club!)
• Trade/swap/leading stuff (ex tools, books, unused snacks, boardgames, clothes, etc..)
• Offer to be apart of a shared calander (I use Cozi personally but again use your preferred)
• Event spamming (community event sharing bc no one ever gets proper info on them in time)
• Plant swaps (I personally know like 3 different plant ppl who specialize in different types of plants ex 1 person does a lot of herbs and another does all succulents and another does super well with berries and they always wanna get rid of the babies or spread the spoils)
• Organizing work parties (repair parties ex fences/roofs/, bulk cooking parties ex my families perogie parties, tax prep parties, hair dying get togethers, etc..)

Fun ideas for village-

• Make a village badge/crest of some kind (at one point was making badges for dinner parties as gifts so this is an easy one for me)
• Funny pet photos/meme dump ground

This allows for a pretty fun way to also make ppl feel connected. If I get to know someone fairly well like my neighbor or another parent from my kiddos school- I’ll just add them to my weird little club thing! Here’s a patch for you. Your family now!!

derinthescarletpescatarian:

writing-prompt-s:

Your roommate is so bad at pretending to be a human, you’ve started to just automatically back him up in public. Tonight he tells you how nice it is to know the only other alien in the city, and you have to break the bad news

It started pretty simply. “Needs more plutonium,” your roommate said on your third day of university as you ate noodles together. Then he froze, staring at you, the colour draining from his face.

A weird joke to pull out, sure, but not panic-weird. You grew up a nerd. Your in-jokes are weirder. This guy, you decide, is unbelievably shy. Might have had bad experiences. Or social anxiety maybe.

You just give him a reassuring grin. “Definitely needs more plutonium,” you agree, and take a big bite of noodle, and something in him relaxes and he looks at you with a strange kind of understanding that you can’t really interpret, and from then on, you have a new close friend.

Keep reading

caimofnoceur:

47 more free and helpful things, that everyone can take advantage of

Music

• Gnoosic is your place go for new music recommendations. It asks for three of your favourite bands, and based on them, spits out an artist that you might like. You can also “like”, “dislike”, or mark it as something you aren’t familiar with – which further refines the results.
• NoCopyrightSounds is a copyright free / stream safe record label, providing free to use music to the content creator community. NCS Music is free to use for independent Creators and their UGC (User Generated Content) on YouTube & Twitch - always remember to credit the Artist, track and NCS and link back to our original NCS upload.
• Radio Garden take a trip ‘round the world’s airwaves! Just pick a city — literally any city — and Radio Garden will play you whatever its local radio station is broadcasting.
• Radiooooo Radio Garden walked so Radiooooo could run. This site adds a timeline function so you can listen to radio from not just anywhere, but anywhen. Get down to those 1910s Germany bops!

Art

• Krita free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation.It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Chrome OS
• 29a.ch interactive site that lets you color what looks to be a map of the cosmos, but I’m honestly not sure. Whatever it is, it’s mesmerizing.

Games

• Patatap is an interactive website that responds to the keys on your keyboard with a sound and a brief animation. Now imagine hammering in entire sentences – and you got an explosion of sounds, colors, and movement! Once you start typing in random paragraphs, it becomes almost hypnotic, in a way.
• Drench a very simple browser game, Drench gives you a board with different colored tiles, and you use the buttons to flip the colors around. Do this until your board is full of tiles of a single color only.
• River Styx an interactive point-and-click game that takes you through the river Styx and the Underworld. You will meet many Greek Gods and Goddesses here, and you will also be learning a lot about their myths and legends.
• 2048 this website lets you play a game called 2048, which is kinda like Tetris but with addition. Use your arrow keys to try to combine numbers until you reach 2048, or go ~beyond~ and try to reach 4096.
• Little Alchemy 2 fun little time killer. As its name suggests, the website deals with the process of transformation you achieve when you start mixing different things. You start with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. The goal is to create as many different materials or objects as possible. For example, earth and air will form dust. There are no rules just mix and match your creations to create new ones. You will not even know where your time went.
• Akinator website is magic or rather feels like one. You can think of any character in this entire world and through a series of question, it will deduce the name. Don’t believe me, go try for yourself.
• Find the Invisible Cow You’re going to want to make sure your sound is on in this fun finding game! Find the invisible cow in this laugh out loud version of hot and cold.
• CookieClicker How fast can you click for cookies? Level up and become a cookie pro with this fun time-wasting website!

Knowledge

• Zooniverse A really neat website that brings people together to create one of the largest platforms for people-powered research. Volunteers come together to assist professional researchers. There is no need for a specialised background or training; all you have to do is to answer simple questions.
• Cool Hunting is a really cool publication platform that uncovers the latest in design, technology, style, travel, art and culture. If you are into art, architecture, and culture, then this website is perfect for you.
• OCEARCH Shark Tracker This one looks right on the money for the folks who can’t get enough of sharks! With OCEARCH Shark Tracker, you can keep a track of tagged sharks as they are busy swimming around the deep ocean. Moreover, the website also lets you zoom in on a particular location to check where sharks have been swimming for the past year.
• Ad Astra-app An essential tool for every astronomer. The star atlas and skyguide that makes it really easy to pick the best objects, make your own observation list and use it when you are outside
• 100,000 Stars is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen on the web. It shows a representation of galaxy with stars inside it. You can take a tour which starts from the Sun and takes you to the outer edges of the galaxy while teaching you valuable insights in between.
• wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles on a variety of topics. For example: How to make ginger ale, How change a lock or How to survive an encounter with an ostrich.

Cooking

• Cooking for Engineers is a godsend for those who love to cook. This website has it all, from recipes, to kitchen gear, to cooking tests, down to a handy dictionary. The best part about this website is its classic 90’s layout, which makes accessing the recipes and files intuitive and easier.
• My Fridge Food at this point, your fridge probs has, like, three random items in it, and you’re starting to panic about meal options. Enter My Fridge Food, which inputs everything you have in your kitchen and outputs a recipe. Bless.

Work, or relax

• Da Font Tired of your basic Times New Roman? You can spend hours downloading new fonts from typography artists to spice up your new document!
• A Soft Murmur If you’re looking to create your own ambient background music to listen to while you work or read, A Soft Murmur is the fun website for you! Create your own mix of white noise and other natural sounds to relax and waste some time.
• Rainy Mood Get all the benefits of rain without getting caught in it with Rainy Mood! This is perfect for setting a relaxed and chilled out mood.
• I Waste So Much Time The website is designed to literally allow you to waste your time. There are no long articles, just funny pictures with embedded texts. A very good time waster for short breaks.
• This Is My Website Now The website truly kills your time. It is just a collection of small games which you can play on your browser. Effective for less than 10 minutes of usage, it’s good for a short break.
• Instructables If you’ve always wanted to learn how to DIY but didn’t know where to start, try Instructables. They have community posts with step-by-step instructions to help you become a DIY master in no time.
• OBS Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers. only downside to it is that you have a power director watermark in the corner of your video, but its not very large.
• Sleepytime is your sleeping schedule out of whack? This fun website calculates exactly when you need to go to sleep and wake up in order to get a good night’s sleep.

Boredom

• MapCrunch Go on an adventure without leaving your home — because you can’t! This site plops you down in a random location on the globe, and all that’s left to do is explore.
• List of Conspiracy Theories Get sucked down the dark rabbit hole of the internet that will have you denying history and wearing tinfoil hats. Wikipedia’s list of conspiracy theories will have you scrolling for ages!
• This Person Does Not Exist If AI and deep-fakes fascinate you, this is a website that will either make you very excited, or give you nightmares about whether ‘The Matrix’ is real, and if you, at some point in your life, took the blue pill instead of the red one. Either way, the website generates fake people using GAN (or generative adversarial networks), and displays them to you. You can refresh the page to see a different face. Also, if this interests you, you might also like:
• This Cat Does Not Exist. You know, because why stare at human faces when you can look at cats instead.
• The Useless Web Want to see what the Internet truly has to offer? Take a peek at The Useless Web to see what truly is out there.
• Not Always Right Had a bad day at work? Did that one annoying, pesky customer or client who just wouldn’t shut up tried to give you a hard time, and succeeded? Then this website is just perfect for you! It’s a collection of stories about customers who just don’t know when to shut up.
• Zoom Quilt If you’re looking to be hypnotized, then check out this site, which is basically a picture that infinitely zooms in to reveal new pictures.

Just for fun

• Tickld is your go-to spot for anything humorous and funny, for anything that’s really cool and interesting, or stuff that’s just plain WTF.
• Paper Toilet Just because stores are sold out of toilet paper doesn’t mean you have to live without. This site features some interactive TP that you can roll up or down.
• The Passive-Aggressive Password Machine Type a password (real or fake) into this site and it’ll shade you for how much it sucks.
• CoolThings is a collection of cool things. From entertainment, to gadgets, to even toys and inventions, there is bound to be something here that will interest you.
• This Is Why I Am Broke This is a great website for discovering new gift ideas which are distinct. The products range from a few dollars to a few thousand. There’s something for everyone here.
• PostSecret is a very interesting website. Visitors are encouraged to send in anonymous postcards on which they write their secrets. There are all sorts of secrets on all kinds of postcards, and the variations make this a really interesting project. However, be warned – these secrets are very real… and very heavy.
• NOIYS – Post, read, forget is a place to post an anonymous note to be viewed by many people, only to be deleted within 24 hours. It’s the perfect website for venting anonymously and not worry about the consequences, as it will be deleted within a day. The best part (or maybe worst) is that strangers can reply to your note, too. That way, you can have a running conversation with a complete stranger.
• Scream Into the Void Take your outrage about our current situation (or any problem in your life) and throw it into the void. Just type out your feels and then click the “Scream” button, which does exactly what you think it does.

And lastly…

• Dildo Generator Welcome, good citizens of the web, to my favorite site of all time. It’s right in the name: You can generate a custom dildo by length, width, base, contours, and so many more variables. Things get wild pretty fast.
• Eyebleach Did you see something on the internet that was just too scary? Or just need to get it out of your head? Click on Eyebleach to be fed adorable pictures of puppies, kitties, or babies!

Earlier post

(via dduane)

inkskinned:

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he’d hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP “ironically.” the internet liked the kind of crass, “anti-mainstream” vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be “hard to love” and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it’s wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a “loophole.” characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say “beats me!!” or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like “are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?” because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here’s the thing: i wasn’t wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i’ve made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i’ve made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i’ve made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it’s more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it’s that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don’t think that’s true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we’ve got. i can’t enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn’t exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn’t recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn’t human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.

charlesoberonn:

One quiet day on the farm, the Little Red Hen found some wheat seeds and decided to make bread.

“Who will help me plant these seeds?” the Little Red Hen asked.

“I would.” said the Horse “But I’m a workhorse, and I’m too busy moving carts around.”

And so the Little Red Hen planted the seeds by herself. And they grew into bountiful golden crops.

“Who will help me harvest the wheat?” the Little Red Hen asked.

“I would.” said the Dog “But I’m a guarddog, and I’m too busy keeping away burglars and predators.”

And so the Little Red Hen harvested the wheat herself and made it into flour.

“Who will help me bake the flour?” the Little Red Hen asked.

“I would.” said the Pig “But I’m a mother of 5 newborn piglets, and I’m too busy taking care of my young.”

And so the Little Red Hen baked the bread herself into twenty beautiful loaves.

“Who will help me eat the bread?” the Little Red Hen asked.

“We would.” said the Farm Animals. “But we’re ashamed, for we didn’t do anything to make the bread.”

“Nonsense!” said the Little Red Hen. “You, Horse, helped move around the stones that built my oven. You, Dog, kept me safe while I worked. And you, Pig, are raising a new generation of Farm Animals, who will too contribute to our Farm one day. You’ve all helped me so much by simply being you.”

“Besides,” the Little Red Hen added. “I couldn’t possibly eat all the loaves on my own, most of them would go to waste. Come, eat with me.”

And so the Little Red Hen and the Farm Animals ate the bread together. And all saw their own, and each other’s, worth.

(via fox-bright)