The Skellingcorner

[sweetlittlevampire]

My current rosary collection. I’m not Christian by any means, but I’ve always been drawn to any kind of prayer beads. As a kid, I used to admire my grandfather’s Muslim prayer beads; they were green with a coral red tassel. My grandma’s rosary looked like shiny black crystals with a brass-looking cross and middle piece. I was never allowed to play with both of them, but I was allowed to hold them while my grandparents explained to me what they were respectively.

I am not christened, so I got my first rosary in Bavaria. I acquired more later - one or two on each trip - but I also got many at our country’s annual procession for the Patron Saint, which is Mary the Consoler of the Afflicted. I would never wear them as an accessory; I have way too much respect.

I’m actually in the process of picking out a rosary as a gift for a friend. I do clean my rosaries a few times a year, but it’s rare that I have them all out at once in their boxes. There are two kids rosaries, one is ring-sized, five are bracelet-sized (or made to be hung from a car’s rear view mirror), and there’s one made entirely of quartz and one made entirely of amethyst. In total there are about 35.

[word-nerds-united]

[mdintraining]

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has trouble remembering developmental milestones. I put these together, but can’t take credit for any of the photography. Hope someone finds them helpful!

[insanelycoolish]

YES I NEED THIS. :D

[xionical]

Time to use this for writingggg

Woah i was potty trained at 10 months

[derinthemadscientist]

It’s worth noting that these are averages. The kid I look after has been able to climb stairs since about 10 months but still, at 18 months, knows about 5 words that he can’t pronounce properly because he only knows one vowel sound and like 4 constonants. This is normal. Don’t be too concerned if your kids aren’t hitting the milestones on time, or hitting them way too early – different kids develop wildly differently.

[word-nerds-united]

According to my mother I was speaking simple sentences at 9 months. 

[sweetlittlevampire]

UGH, I have to type up this one press report, and I’m sure I don’t have more than two additional paragraphs to type, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to it. i have to do quite a bit of grocery shopping after work, so it’ll be dark when I get home, and I so wish I could leave right now…but I can’t.

*sighs* Someone send me motivation. 

[writingwithcolor]

simplyboringlybored asked:

I’ve looked here for a lot of help but there’s one thing I’m still stuck on. So I’m an African American woman but I feel like I can’t write ppl of my same color. I want to really and I’m honestly inspired by other African American writers who craft magical worlds while still keeping to the trueness of what it means to be black in this world. Is there a way I can get more comfortable with writing characters of my color without feeling like I’m shaming the entire black community?

Writing Authentic Black Characters (as a Black writer)

You won’t be shaming the Black community! There’s no one true way to be Black, live Black, or write a Black character. Release the pressure that you need to hit some “Blackness checkpoints” in order to write an acceptable story. That’s how you unintentionally limit Black people as having to conform to certain cultural rules or stereotypes.  

 Write from your true, authentic place. 

As long as you’re describing your character and aren’t unleashing unchecked anti-Black racism into the story (Stuff like relying on stereotypes or exalting a character for being “not like the other Black girls”) I trust you, as a fellow Black writer, to spin an amazing tale that others will want to read, Black or no. 

Getting more comfortable as a writer of color:

Journal

I recommend you journal, if you don’t already.

Topics for inspiration:

• Your day
• A funny event
• experience over the upcoming holiday season
• a moment when you felt something deeply emotional. 
• your perspectives and experience on;
• hair care
• skin color
• Microaggressions
• self love and acceptance. 

Now that is an authentic Black voice – yours. Start to get comfortable with accepting that. Your voice, and the perspectives you’ll bring, is good enough. There will be people who relate. 

Read Diverse Stories

Read more stories with Black people and other PoC. Fiction, non-fiction, blog posts and online threads (like reddit Black ppl groups) These tales won’t all read the same because they’re different stories with different people. 

Let’s abandon the notion that white people are the “default” and thus an easy character. 

You’re the protagonist in your own life, aren’t you? So you’ve already got the experience.

Talk to others

It might help to connect with other Black writers and/or other People of Color. You can certainly bring up your insecurities if you find a group you’re comfortable in. You’re not the only writer who feels these doubts. You may find some good advice. 

Maya Angelou even struggled with self-doubts and impostor syndrome.

 “Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.”

― Maya Angelou

Recommended WWC Articles 

Check out the following articles below. They deal especially on 1.) how fear keeps us from including ourselves in our own stories and 2) Writing Characters of Color for those new at diverse, inclusive writing. 

• Braving Diversity: How to Write Yourself (and others) out of your Story

• Series: Do’s of Writing PoC / Creating PoC / Showing Culture 

–Mod Colette

[sweetlittlevampire]

Aaaaaand I’m back at work after my trip! It has been wonderful - very rainy on some days (which we mostly spent indoors in museums or roaming foreign cities anyways), very sunny on others, with even a hint of snow. You should have seen the colours of the forest though! So very lovely. I’m on my work computer so I haven’t got them with me, but I might post a few pictures later for you all to see.

And because I got a new book, I ended up reading way too much last night, which means I’m attempting to tackle this 8-hour-shift while running on, like, 2 ½ hours on sleep. i can sleep in tomorrow though, so it should be fine.

I still have some stuff to do, so I will be responding to everything Godchild Secret Santa-related this weekend at the latest. Sorry for the delay!

[fandonetrash]

[rossberrypie]

Best pirate ive ever seen…

[artandrhinos]

I am living for this meme

[smitethepatriarchy]

I watched this without sound at first and can say that the music changes everything.

[iamthekingofsass]

IM IN TEARS

[rpgrules]

[imnotgabrielle]

Creation 💀

Instagram

[fandonetrash]

[wet-monsoon]

it’s kind of incredible how much pixar has backpedaled over the last couple of years, from the standpoint of character design 

these were the kind of characters designs they had when they did their first movie with humans as their main cast 

despite being cg all of the characters are visually distinct from each other and they look like 2d figures translated into a 3d environment

now it’s just???

all their human characters kind of lack that visual distinction and they’re all just? cute? 

[raedioisotope]

Alright, I wasn’t gonna comment b/c it’s kind of a waste of time, but I see a lotta folks tryin to pass off “Incredibles” designs as ‘an attempt to avoid Uncanny Valley with primitive tech’ or ‘resembling comic book art’, and a lot of other…. un-design-savvy comments.

Brad Bird had come from a background in traditional animation, he’s the guy behind this

So Lasseter (Pixar) rings up Bird like “Hey you wanna make a CG movie with us” and Bird’s like “Yeah, lemme bring my guys”, artists like Lou Romano, Teddy Newton, Tony Fucile, and Albert Lozano, who worked with Bird previously.

This may have been Pixar’s first production to feature an entirely human cast, but I think mostly what the excellence in designs boils down to is simply good artists with good taste.

And then have the fantastic designs in “Ratatouille”, also by Bird and his boys

We’ve also got the film “Up”, directed by Pete Doctor. Animated films rely on several artists for the designs of characters, set, props, ect, but it often leans towards one artist’s work. Putting other artists in charge gives “Up” a distinctive visual difference in style to Bird’s films.

You could place the blame on all these newer movies featuring mostly children characters, but I mean…..

Come on. Way to drop the ball on the chance to play with evolution in a fictional, animated setting. The issue isn’t what the tech was or wasn’t, is or isn’t capable of. This comes down to the artistic choices.

Anyway, I wish I could get more in-depth with this, but it’s difficult to find the information I need online in a timely manner, and I don’t have my books here with me.

If you’re interested in the designs/work that goes into animated films, check out the “Art Of __” books. The older ones I mean, that have actual raw concept art done for production and not just a bunch of cutsie drawings of characters b/c that’s what sells.

[exigetspersonal]

The difference between then and now is simply that Pixar was bought out by Disney, and is now one of Disney’s biggest money-spinners. They make superhero movies focus-grouped for boys, princess movies focus-grouped for girls, and since Pixar movies are supposed to appeal to both those genders equally you get, well, that. A neutered, generically cute art style that lends itself to big-eyed dolls with brushable hair and cute animal plush toys that make noises when you squeeze them.

I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again; Disney (and by extension, Pixar) don’t make art any more. With a few scant exceptions they haven’t made art for decades. What they make is money. What they’re selling is a brand. Their last few passion projects spent years in development hell, hemorrhaging money the entire time, so what would eventually become Tangled, Frozen, and The Good Dinosaur ended up as bland and generic simply to recoup some of that enormous loss. And by being bland and generic, they ended up turning a massive profit, so you can expect that trend to continue.

 A corporation that sells everything from kid-friendly cruise holidays to mickey-themed wedding packages is not going to make art. A studio that’s so creatively bankrupt that it’s now rebooting every good movie it’s ever made is not going to make art. If you want art, look to smaller studios (Laika, Reel FX), smaller, lower-budget projects (Captain Underpants), and anything that Hollywood considers ‘risky’.

Expecting Disney (and Pixar) to make anything that doesn’t blandly appeal to everyone at this point is like expecting blood to come out of a stone.

[analvelocity]

#reblogging this makes me feel like a boomer complaining that everything used to be better when i was young

Nah, there’s more good content, real art coming out now than ever before, it’s just not coming out of Disney.

[fandonetrash]

[marzipanandminutiae]

reading letters from 1818 is wild

“it’s that time of the year when I get colds for no apparent reason again” have some Clairitin hon

[marzipanandminutiae]

But also we’re not becoming allergic to everything nowadays like certain white moms fear. Allergies have always existed. They were just talked about differently

Like “oh clams always ~turn my stomach~”. Or “what a pity he was taken from us at age 5”

[rosslynpaladin]

“Well we didn’t have all this fancy chronic illness stuff in the Olden Days, what did people do then??”

They died, Ashleigh. 

[rowantheexplorer]

This is a picture tracking bullet holes on Allied planes that encountered Nazi anti-aircraft fire in WW2.

At first, the military wanted to reinforce those areas, because obviously that’s where the ground crews observed the most damage on returning planes. Until Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out that this was the damage on the planes that made it home, and the Allies should armor the areas where there are no dots at all, because those are the places where the planes won’t survive when hit. This phenomenon is called survivorship bias, a logic error where you focus on things that survived when you should really be looking at things that didn’t.

We have higher rates of mental illness now? Maybe that’s because we’ve stopped killing people for being “possessed” or “witches.” Higher rate of allergies? Anaphylaxis kills, and does so really fast if you don’t know what’s happening. Higher claims of rape? Maybe victims are less afraid of coming forward. These problems were all happening before, but now we’ve reinforced the medical and social structures needed to help these people survive. And we still have a long way to go.

[twodotsknowwhy]

This is one of my favorite anecdotes to show how clever rewording of statistics can make them say the opposite of what they mean:

Every time a state makes riding a motorcycle without a helmet illegal, the number of ER patients seriously injured in motorcycle accidents skyrockets. Every single time.

When you phrase it just right, it makes it sound like it’s more dangerous to ride a motorcycle with a helmet than without one. Of course, the reality is that before those laws, those patients were going to the morgue, not the ER.

[i-cannot-live-without-coffee]

Isn’t this why more people are getting cancer and heart disease? Because they’re living long enough to get them because fewer people are dying young of smallpox and the like?

[fandonetrash]

[meanplastic]

Me practicing this housewife thing for when I drop out of uni

[twerkcircus]

Hey so I just feel the need to add this. NEVER deep fry in a shallow pot. What happened here is this person put frozen fries in hot oil, and the hot oil will nearly double in size when you drop something cold in it. Then it overflows out of the pot and you have a grease fire. You should never have oil more than about a third of the way up the pot.

[antihelix]

Reblogging because even I didn’t officially know this.

[bakedsweetroll]

Also never use water to put out a grease fire

[iamthekingofsass]

How are yall still alive fkskjfsljgkdjfjfks

[mariah-wants-to-live]

[rosswoodpark]

‪GOD I found another article about why ADHD kids say “I don’t know” so much. my entire childhood was getting yelled at for doing some ADHD shit and me not being able to offer an explanation when asked why I did something. ‬

[abcsofadhd]

Adding to this, its cause of our executive dysfunction and emotional dysregulation (naturally there’s more things at play than just these two but I’m naming main aspects).

We tend to have alexithymia, meaning we have difficulty identifying and describing own feelings. 

You can’t say how you feel if you legit don’t know.

Self monitoring is an executive function; our self awareness about how we are doing presently .. which is hampered in ADHDers. 

You can’t say what you think if you legit don’t know.

[gayvian]

oh my god

[priamlynch-doodles]

…..that explains. So. Much.

[tarot-card-based-hell]

holyshitthatsme