my trick for getting through grad school is learning to navigate the quadrants with all their nuances

people really underestimate the importance of mastering that bottom right. quitting things is a skill! it can improve your life and open up new opportunities! add it to your arsenal today

[id.

a square split into four quadrants by 2 lines. the left part on the horizontal line reads "don't give up", and the right reads "give up". the top part on the vertical line reads "you can do it" and the bottom reads "you can't do it".

the top left quadrant (don't give up, you can do it) reads, you will prevail. you have all the necessary skills to pull this off.

the top right quadrant (give up, you can do it) reads, you don't have to prove anything to anyone. let yourself rest.

the bottom left quadrant (don't give up, you can't do it) reads, the only way to learn is by failing. you will get the hang of it, but for now just push through.

the bottom right quadrant (give up, you can't do it) reads, know your limits. not everything is your burden to bear. walk out.

/id]

For the curious, this chap is processing flax, then spinning it into cordage, then twisting those cords into rope.

when you’re at the end of your rope but must carry on regardless

This is from Eugenio Monesma, a man who has dedicated his life to making documentaries about all the living traditions and craftsmen that still live in Spain, is not the first time I’ve seen his stuff uncredited on Tik Tok, which is a shame because he has over 20 years worth of videos of his work for free on his channel.

Even if you don’t understand Spanish do give it a look please, very interesting stuff, you’re sure to find something interesting across his 1000+ videos.

Luckyly this video comes with subtitles so please enjoy seeing the process more in depth

“What good is this knowledge? It’s the 21st century! We don’t need this stuff!!”

Dude. Dude. My Dude…

There are things we still need to do by hand! You can still literally send far more information far faster by putting a harddrive in a box and mailing that box than you can by trying to transmit it at the highest broadband speed money can buy.

There are people who have gone back to the old ways, re-engineered them, and came up with better materials than the previous modern version.

We are still learning the secrets of ancient Roman concrete, which is thousands-of-years-provably to be vastly superior to modern concrete.

You never know what good, solid knowledge you will regain by re-studying the Old Ways.

Let me tell you about making sure you keep your winter mittens in the snow.

There are people who run a cord from one mitten cuff to the other, up through one jacket sleeve and out the other. But what happens when you do that? First of all, those mittens are right there, dangling against your hands as you’re trying to work. They’re also dangling cuff-up, which means they are going to fill with snow. Either because the snow is falling, or they’re getting dragged along the ground by their lanyard tether.

Inuit folks did it differently. They created a lanyard strap that starts in the armpit of their parkas (winter pullover coat). This means that when they remove their mitten to do something with their fingers, the mitten hangs at their side, not bumping into that hand, not interfering with their work.

And then they attached the other end of the lanyard to the yoke of the thumb, that webby-like span between the thumb and the side of the palm. Because the mitten cuffs are so long compared to the finger pocket area, when the mitten dangles, it dangles cuff-down. It doesn’t drag cuff-opening-first through the snow. It doesn’t let falling snow (whether falling from the clouds or falling off a disturbed tree branch) fall into the mitten, because the mitten opening is pointed the wrong way.

It’s absolute genius…and it’s a technological innovation that is thousands of years old.

Study these old ways with an open mind!

There are a bunch of plant fibers that aren’t even used anymore, like Kudzu (Pueraria montana) and Dogbane (Apocyonum cannabinum)

They could be much more environmentally friendly to grow than cotton in regions where they grow well

Listen to me: You get good at things by being bad at them. You learn by failing. You gain competency and a sense of mastery by failing at something many times and in many interesting ways.

The sooner you are able to laugh at your own failures, to enjoy the process of messing up, the easier life will be. Because you'll no longer be afraid of learning.

And once you're no longer afraid of failing, you can learn anything.

i wish it were as easy as it sounds

And that's the thing of it, isn't it? Failing and accepting a failure is itself a skill.

And it can be very hard to learn, especially if you come from a family where a failure is a sign that you are a failure instead of a sign that you are learning.

You're going to fail at failing well. There are going to be times when it hurts, times when your brain is telling you that you should just give up and you'll never get it. Times when a failure is going to frustrate you to no end.

And you can still learn to fail well. You can learn to see it as a sign that you're learning, you can learn to give a little chuckle and say to yourself, well, everyone screws up sometimes, I'm just learning.

It is not easy, but it is important.

Every single time I say the phrase “I was classically trained in the art of multiple choice tests” everyone in the room who’s not a millennial laughs at my joke while all the other millennials in the room immediately look like they just walked in on a funeral by accident.

teach me please

Why? It has nothing to do with the real world and I’m mad that the school system taught me how to take multiple choice tests rather than write a report for a job or properly research what issues are important when deciding who to vote for in an election. Or like… accurate history. You know. Actual stuff you need to know to be a person.

im currently stuck in the school system and I want cheat codes

Okay, I completely understand wanting to know the actual stuff, I want to know those things too, and those are things im working on learning. but to be able to get to the information that tells me these things I need to survive this hellhole of a system and im bad at tests, which means i dont survive very well. 

Okay fine.

As someone who is also classically trained in the art of multiple choice test, I can confirm

Yeah I learned all this shit too. And like while most things public school teaches you is such fucking bullshit, this is actually true.

The C trick isn’t always useful, especially when it’s a computer-generated test. But I would recommend choosing an option to stick to, if only because it limits the brain energy you use on questions you can’t answer.

Similarly, don’t panic if you’re getting A for five questions in a row: if the teacher has made any attempt to randomize answers, this is entirely possible. I’ve also known teachers who do this on purpose to mess with students (yes, really).

Also, this is very important: As long as your test doesn’t deduct points for wrong answers, you should always answer every question no matter what. Use the last 5 minutes to fill them all in.

Super fucked up that I can’t be a master-level expert in knitting AND woodworking AND silversmithing AND embroidery AND soap making AND spinning AND -

“Who would ever want to be immortal? Can you imagine the loneliness, knowing that there’s no one else like you, cursed to outlive -” shut up!! Some of us have shit to do and aren’t cowards!!

"Plant blindness" was coined as a term relating to the tendency to fail to notice plants in your environment, to view them as unimportant backdrop.

The tendency that concerns me the most is not this per se, but rather the inability to notice plants that comes from the inability to identify them, causing your brain to see the world in terms of "grass" surfaces, "weeds," "flowers" and "bushes" and "trees"

I can identify most wild plants I encounter on sight now—it's hard to even imagine how I lived differently.

The change is shocking. Learning to see plants was not just a matter of adding knowledge to my head, but creating totally new neural pathways. I believe my brain's capability for noticing and processing detail is profoundly increased. I can look much more closely at surfaces and objects and notice and be immediately drawn to small details.

The way I take photos is very different. When I look at outdoor photos from before I learned the plants, they are very broad and zoomed-out pictures of only the most obvious and unmissable features. It really appears like I was stumbling through the world almost blind, able to see big, obvious objects and nothing else.

And when I started learning to identify plants, oh, it was so painful, they all looked the same, and I couldn't even see the small details that set them apart! And there were no good resources or guides! I was fighting for my life!

And it's normal, that's the wild thing, most people go through life not being able to name the common plants that are all around them. This thought is scary and alien to me now, but a couple years ago I was entirely aware of my ignorance and felt no need to fix it. I didn't even know what the trees in my backyard were and I had lived here for 10 years and I wasn't troubled by it.

Reasons knowing the plants is important:

“If it sucks hit da bricks” isn’t just a useful litany it’s also a skill you have to train. You gotta start with small stuff like leaving boring parties and refusing minor obligations to get the guts for the big stuff like quitting garbage jobs, cutting off a shitty relationship and getting out of a bad situation. Know what your time is worth

the original post (twitter, DASHAREZ0NE, 2019) lists

Starting small is important (:

so sick how the only way you can get experience is through experience. and the only way you can get good is through the humiliating ordeal of sucking ass at it

Hold on, this is fascinating. Reblog this and tell me in the notes how old you are and if you ever had typing lessons.

What in God’s good name is a “typing lesson”

I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not

I’m serious what is a typing lesson? What would they teach you? To type? My brother in Christ it is like writing with a pen but technically easier.

Before home computers were very common, people typically only typed for business-related things, so the only people that actually knew how to use typewriters and word processors were authors, secretaries, accountants, etc. These people would take classes for typing bc it was seen as a skill. This gradually fell out of fashion, much like teaching kids cursive

Typing is only intuitive to gen y & z bc most of us learned through computer games or had someone tell us where to rest our fingers. People who never learned to type use just their index fingers, hit one key, take a long time to find the next letter, hit it with an index finger, and repeat until finished

34 i played this:

35 and I absolutely hated typing lessons in fifth grade because I always got in trouble for not “typing correctly”, ie I didn’t leave my fingers on the keys and I looked down at the keys while typing.

[image description: the loading screen for the game “Mario Teaches Typing.” it features Mario sitting at a computer and Toad, Luigi, and Peach running past and looking at him. at the bottom of the screen is the text, “Copyright 1992 Interplay Productions and Nintendo.” end image description.]

LOUDER

Apocalypse Skills

Soap!! Lye Safety 101 (article) Soap from ash and lard (article) Spot lye-heavy soap, zap ph test Rendering tallow or lard (article), canning (article) Makeshift soap molds, fancy hinged soap mold, make oilcloth (article) to line molds (or for waterproofing clothing)

edit: turns out I had linked the oilcloth tutorial video three times instead of the lye safety vid and lining the molds vid lmao whoops

Fiber Processing

Shearing a sheep with electric clippers, by hand, (electric shears article, hand shears article) Shearing Llama or alpaca by hand no restraints, with minimal restraints (llama article – couldn’t find written detailed process for shearing camelids, but it is much like shearing a sheep, just not 100%) Flax plant to linen fiber (article), dress a distaff (article) and spin by hand. Skirting fleece (article) Cleaning sheep wool (article) (collect lanolin from wool) Picking and carding alpaca fiber, llama fiber (combing method) (article for combing and carding all fleeces), DIY picker for mechanized picking. Picking fleece by hand, and carding vs combing, combing wool, carding wool Picking and combing cotton (no article here but cotton is pretty straightforward to clean–just get the seeds out. then card like fleece)

if you like this series consider dropping me a few pennies! paypal, kofi, cashapp

look…………….. write as much shitty fic as you want. nobody can stop you. you’re learning constantly and it’s better to write hackneyed implausible ridiculousness than it is to not write at all out of fear of fucking up. you’re good

There was an experiment a professor did. I think it was pottery students. He did an experiment of “quality” vs “quantity”. One half of the class he told; you have to make as many pots as possible. Good pots, bad pots, shitty pots, whatever. The more pots you make, the higher your grade.

The other half of the class were told, “you can make only one pot”. But that pot had to be perfect. The quality had to be high; the highest quality pot would get the best mark.

But when it came to the grading, they noticed something weird.

All the best quality pots were in the ‘quantity’ group.

The guys who were literally churning out pots, trying to make as many as possible, not concentrating on the quality. But every pot they made, made them better at making pots. By the end of the month (I think it was a month) - they had some pretty awesome pots coming out, because they enjoying finding all the ways and all the things they could do to make all their pots. Where as the ‘quality’ guys had spent their time reading up on pots, and technique, and researching and planning; which was all great but they’d had no further practice at actually making pots.

The best way to get really good at something, the only way to be really good at something, is to make lots of shitty attempts at that thing several of which will fail. If all you create are perfect things then you won’t improve, because how can you improve on perfect?

tl:dr MAKE YOUR SHITTY POTS.

AMEN this goes for anything too!!! drawing, painting, sewing, knitting you name it. Its so much better to just do the thing your working on, shitty or not it takes less of a toll on you to just finish a thing than to worry about fucking it up first time.

EVERYBODY MAKE YOUR POTS!

I love kids they’re all like.. “when i grow up i’m gonna be an astronaut and a chef and a doctor and an olympic swimmer” like that self confidence! That drive! That optimism! Where does it go

It gets destroyed by adults not believing in you and telling you to pick a realistic career. And by society creating all these obstacles to the point that you’re too tired to try.

But they’re not really unrealistic, SOMEBODY is going to be an olympic swimmer and it might as well be you.

Actually I want to talk about this a little more than I did, because olympic swimming is incredible and works perfectly to talk about attaining goals.

I used to be a varsity swimmer, and I was damn good, but I was forced into it by my parents and completely lost my love for it and therein my drive. But in high school I was swimming against such talented swimmers like Olympic Swimmer Missy Franklin. I’ve met her, and the main difference between her and me was that I was strong but had no passion, but she was strong BECAUSE she had passion. 

And I could have been good, really good, maybe even Olympic good. I even have the predisposition for it, been swimming since I was 2 years old, have a mom who was almost an olympic swimmer. Missy didn’t have either of those things, she just wanted it, loved it, had been doing it for a long time, and decided she was going to kick ass at it.

Right, that’s great and all, but I completely missed my opportunity to be an olympic swimmer, yeah? and can never achieve those dreams I had as a kid? No, not even though. There was this whole thought that female athletes peak when they’re 17 years old and lose their skills quickly after that, and male athletes peak around 19. But then Olympic Swimmer Dara Torres shows up. She was an olympic swimmer when she was 17, 21 and 25. Pretty normal age for retirement. She had a few kids. She kicked butt at being a mom. 

And then at 33 years old she decides she’s bored or something gets back in shape and kicks so much ass at the trials that she lands herself on the Olympic Team ONCE AGAIN. And then 8 years later, she decides, heck I’m 41 now, no one has ever made the olympic swim team as old as I am, I want to get in shape yet again and teach these children how sports work.

And she still has the record for oldest US Olympic Swimmer, not even any men have beat out that record.

So basically what I’m saying is you could be an olympic swimmer, you really could be. And there are obviously a lot of things stopping you and trying to get in your way: your brain, society, too much chocolate cake for example. But if you really dedicate yourself to it and love it with all of your heart you could, you really could.

And lets say olympic swimming isn’t your jam? That’s cool too. There isn’t a single skill in this world that you can’t learn if you absolutely love it and want to. Any skill you want is going to take time. There are countless famous people who started learning a skill after 20, 30, 40, or even 50. Not a single person has even been president under age 35 (most likely because you’re not allowed to be, but there’s a reason for that). Whatever you want to do you’re probably going to be bad at first, and I’m talking really shitty.

Van Gogh got started in his 20′s and was thought to have no artistic talent at first and was forced to sit in the back of classrooms where the worst artists in the class sat. So yeah you’ll probably be bad, like really bad and everyone including you will think you’re bad. If you stick with it though, if you’re willing to work for years and years, if you keep loving it after all the pain it’s given you, 

then you might just paint Starry Night.

#looks like there’s still time for me to learn how to draw … YES. As someone who started drawing at 35 and who always was like: ‘eh, I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life, but I would love to be able to’ this is near and dear to my heart. If you want to draw, start drawing. Keep drawing. Be shit at drawing at first. Keep it up, doodle things on scraps but also draw stuff you don’t think you can draw. Challenge yourself, you will be surprised what you can do. It will be frustrating at times, but it will also be awesome. It is SO much a matter of practice and dedication, not talent.

This applies for writing, too.  

Don’t ever think for a second that it doesn’t!  Want to start writing?  Then write!  You will get better the more you write, the more often, and you will improve, all of the time, as long as you dedicate yourself.  

The worst lie we tell ourselves is “it’s too late.”

20 year old beginner: one year of learning flute and butterfly knife skillz :)

Fun fact: Adults actually learn those “You need to practice!” skills better than children do. 

Kids tend to want to do literally anything aside from learning this skill my parent is forcing me to learn. 

Adults actually can sit down and practice things for hours on end. Adults WANT to practice to get their skills better. Adults deliberately set aside time every day to practice. Even if it’s just 20 minutes, it’s productive growth and not wiggling in your chair mournfully watching birds out the window. 

Anything from Drawing to Weaving to Violin to fuckin flipping bufferfly knives like a pro - choose a skill and LEARN, dammit! None of that ‘Children’s brains are more malleable’ bullshit. Brain squish is not the end-all of learning!