Tag: interesting

jabberwockypie:

fittingoutjane:

adhdteacherthings:

I used to do things pre-diagnosis and think to myself, “adults don’t do that.” Adults don’t scooter on the backs of shopping carts or lay upside down on the couch or jump up and down while watching TV. But after I got diagnosed with ADHD I realized that adults DO all those things, cuz here I am doing all these things and I’m an adult.

So basically what I’m trying to say is, don’t shame yourself into not doing harmless things that make you happy just cuz you think people your age shouldn’t do it.

It’s not just the harmless happy things, it can also be things you need.  I used to think about ways that I could manage my ADHD better, or ways that other people could help me, and I’d draw a blank.

I’ve recently realized that this is because I had a lot of ideas when I was younger, and people told me I was wrong. No, I couldn’t write my homework down on my hand, I should use a notebook that could get lost at any moment. No, I couldn’t have my school assignments reduced to a more manageable length as long as my test scores stayed up. No, that’s not the way, that’s too weird, fix the problem, but NOT LIKE THAT.

Sometimes, those things you aren’t supposed to do are exactly what you need to do.

Also, lying upside-down activates your parasympathetic nervous system.

Which is REALLY USEFUL if you’re ramping up to a panic attack, because it’ll help stop it!

… I never realised my lifelong habit of lying on sofas and chairs almost upside down was unconscious anxiety management. Noted.

stardustschild:

During Patty Jenkins’ Reddit AMA, a fascinating interpretation was brought up regarding this scene:

“My interpretation of the revisit was that it actually wasn’t necessarily what he said. She (and the audience) has no way of knowing what he said. But the whole lesson of the film is about faith. Believing in something for the sake of hope. So she thinks back to that moment and chooses to believe that he said something beautiful and moving. Because that’s what she needs to believe in order to have hope.” – Leagle_Eagl

empresspinto:

I really like how The Good Doctor portrayed the Autism Parents™, all good-intentioned and loving their child, but not actually taking into account their child’s wants, and not thinking an autistic person can amount to anything… because so many parents of autistic kids are like that, and normally it’s portrayed as a positive thing, but here they showed that it was wrong to do.

Maybe I might actually watch this rather than AVOID like I have had to for so many shows that are purported to be about me and life for me and AREN’T.

portraitoftheoddity:

So at first I was a little ??? about Hela being Thor’s sister in Ragnarok (squeezing her into the role Angela so recently acquired as their long-lost-big-sister in comics), but the more I think about it, the more I like what it does for Thor and Loki’s arc. 

Thor now has two siblings who became his antagonists because of his father keeping secrets – hiding Loki’s heritage, and then hiding Hela’s existence. Which re-enforces how damaging that habit of lying and secrecy is to Asgard’s growth, as represented by Thor. Having those secrets come out and be faced is necessary for Thor’s development and maturity – confronting the sins of his father.

And for Loki – when Loki tries and fails to be a hero, he becomes a villain. He always measures himself against Thor, and then casts himself as Thor’s opposite. But with Hela showing up, suddenly the role of bad guy has been usurped by another sibling; he’s no longer the baddest Asgardian, or even the baddest of Odin’s kids. His sins are now in a whole new context, where his misdeeds are frankly small potatoes. He’s not only been outstripped as a hero by his sibling – he’s been outstripped as a villain. And that forces him to find some other measure of identity; not wholly good, not wholly evil, but something in between – something new. 

Also, it re-enforces their brotherhood in an interesting way. Hela is Asgardian. Hela is Thor’s blood sibling (or at least half-sibling). And Hela is still awful. In that light, Loki can no longer ascribe his wickedness to his heritage – he isn’t evil because of some innate genetic factor, or because he isn’t Asgardian, since Hela is clearly capable of that evil despite being raised on Asgard and having Odin’s genes. And while Hela and Thor share blood, they have no kinship to speak of. Thor and Loki do, despite the lack of blood relation. They snipe and bicker like brothers throughout, and there are callbacks to their childhood and past together (the snake story, ‘get help’). 

Hela’s appearance as Thor’s sister lends new context to both Thor and Loki’s relationship with each other and their family, and I think it gives us, as fandom, a lot of fresh material to play with as far as our boys’ character growth moving forward.

“russian slug, no rifling”

jumpingjacktrash:

writers of avengers fic consistently misunderstand this phrase, and honestly i don’t blame them, it’s pretty confusing in context. bucky barnes is a sniper. snipers use rifles. fury was shot outta nowhere, by a sniper, presumably with a rifle. and if you’re not a humongous gun nut, you probably don’t automatically think slug == shotgun, not rifle. nor will you know that ‘rifling’ can mean two different things.

lucky for you, i am a humongous gun nut, so i’m here to sort that out for you!

okay, for starters, shotgun barrels are, in fact, rifled. and we all know you trace a bullet by the marks the barrel’s rifling leaves on it. so how could the winter soldier’s leavings make the ballistics techs at SHIELD shrug helplessly? well, because it wasn’t a bullet, it was a slug. a shotgun slug. and in shotgun slugs, ‘rifling’ doesn’t mean the grooves in the barrel, it means the fin-like protrusions on the slug itself, like so:

image

that’s an american-made big game slug, and it’s got those fins to keep it twisting despite the drag of the cork back end, which acts to stabilize it with air resistance. short range, but plenty effective if you’re hunting moose.

but the winter soldier was hunting bigger game: nick fury. through a brick wall. which is why he used something more like this:

image

stainless steel saboted slugs. as you can see, they have no rifling – that is, no twisty fins. they rely on their forward-weighted mass for their accuracy, which is tolerably good up to about 100 meters.

there are a number of russian makers of these, going back to soviet days, but you can also easily machine your own. these don’t deform on impact, meaning they wouldn’t have great stopping power against, say, a charging polar bear – but also meaning they keep their trajectory when going through obstructions like the wall of steve’s apartment. and that plastic sabot, or boot, which makes it fit tight and grip in the barrel, flies off when fired, taking with it any identifying marks from the barrel rifling.

i don’t think we ever got to see what bucky fired these from, but it would probably have been something like this:

image

a russian vepr 12 shotgun, which looks a whole lot more like a rifle than a shotgun at first glance. tactical shotguns like these are popular with law enforcement for the same reason bucky used one to shoot fury – urban combat. right through the dang wall.

so there you have it. ‘russian slug, no rifling’ means bucky came loaded for bear.

Viking Age script deciphered – mentions ‘Allah’ and ‘Ali’ – Uppsala University, Sweden

jabberwockypie:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

answersfromvanaheim:

Quote from this article:
“That we so often maintain that Eastern objects in Viking Age graves
could only be the result of plundering and eastward trade doesn’t hold
up as an explanatory model because the inscriptions appear in typical
Viking Age clothing that have their counterparts in preserved images of
Valkyries.”

Fuck yes thank you thank you thank you more widespread acknowledgement of this fucking PLEASE

SQUEEEE!

Viking Age script deciphered – mentions ‘Allah’ and ‘Ali’ – Uppsala University, Sweden

andrusi:

barlowstreet:

thewinterotter:

animalsandtrees:

A new species is evolving before scientists’ eyes in the eastern United States.

Wolves faced with a diminishing number of potential mates are lowering their standards and mating with other, similar species, reported The Economist.

The interbreeding began up to 200 years ago, as European settlers
pushed into southern Ontario and cleared the animal’s habitat for
farming and killed a large number of the wolves that lived there.

That also allowed coyotes to spread from the prairies, and the white farmers brought dogs into the region.

Over time, wolves began mating with their new, genetically similar neighbors.

The resulting offspring — which has been called the eastern coyote
or, to some, the “coywolf” — now number in the millions, according to
researchers at North Carolina State University.

Interspecies-bred animals are typically less vigorous than their parents, The Economist reported — if the offspring survive at all.

That’s not the case at all with the wolf-coyote-dog hybrid, which has developed into a sum greater than the whole of its parts.

At about 55 pounds, the hybrid animal is about twice as heavy as a
standard coyote, and her large jaws, faster legs and muscular body allow her to take down small deer and even hunt moose in packs, and the animal
is skilled at hunting in both open terrain and dense woodland.

An analysis of 437 hybrid animals found that coyote DNA dominates her
genetic makeup, with about one-tenth of its DNA from dogs, usually
larger dogs such as Doberman pinschers and German shepherds, and a
quarter from wolves.

The animal’s cry starts out as a deep-pitched wolf howl that morphs into higher-pitched yipping — like a coyote.

Her dog DNA may carry an additional advantage.

Some scientists think the hybrid animal is able to adapt to city life
— which neither coyotes or wolves have managed to do on their own —
because her dog ancestry allows her  to tolerate people and noise.

The coywolves have spread into some of the nation’s largest cities —
including New York, Boston and Washington — using railway corridors.

The interbreeding allows the animal to diversify her diet and eat
discarded food, along with rodents and smaller mammals — including cats,
which coywolves eat skull and all — and they have evolved to become
nocturnal to avoid humans.

The animals are also smart enough to learn to look both ways before crossing roads.

Not all researchers agree the animal is a distinct species, arguing
that one species does not interbreed with another — although the
hybrid’s existence raises the question of whether wolves and coyotes are
distinct species in the first place.

But scientists who have studied the animal say the mixing of genes
has been much faster, extensive and transformational than anyone had
noticed until fairly recently.

“(This) amazing contemporary evolution story (is) happening right
underneath our nose,” said Roland Kays, a researcher at North Carolina
State.

Watch this report on coywolves.

Raw Story

THIS SHIT IS SO WILD AND IT’S ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING. If you’d like to watch the entire Nature documentary referenced in that “watch this report” link, you can find the whole thing on Youtube. It’s a terrific documentary and a really interesting look at an animal most people don’t even seem to realize exists. The extent to which coywolves have adapted to urban life and the ways in which they’re very distinct from the species they’ve sprung from is pretty incredible.

Okay but it kind of looks like it’s covered in maple syrup

coy wolf

@copperbadge

ultrafacts:

The Europeans used what is known as the “Mediterranean draw” to pull their bowstrings back. This uses the first three fingers of the hand. However, the Mongols used their thumbs to pull the string back,
and curled their index and middle fingers over the thumb to support it.
This, they reckoned, was stronger and allowed for a cleaner release.

(Fact Source)

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

I should be working but instead I am thinking about Steve Rogers’ living arrangements

ninnieamee:

So this concept art for Steve’s apartment.

image

image

It’s, like, maybe canon. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s in a canon grey area. I’m not telling anyone to consider it canon. If you’d rather not, cool, ignore this post. 

What stands out to me about these images is

  1. the bathtub used as a kitchen table,
  2. the interior windows, &
  3. the way one room leads directly from the other, railroad-flat style, with an inner room that has two doors but no large visible window.

To start: that bathtub.

imageimage

A bathtub in the kitchen is quintessentially tenement living. Not that people were assuming Steve was living in the Dakota, but, just as a starting point: he wasn’t spending big bucks on rent. He was probably not in a great neighborhood. He seems to have been lower middle class or poor. This can mean anything — you can be poor and still afford to eat and buy clothes, you can be poor and have none of that — there’s a lot of room in “poor,” and not everyone who lived in what we consider a tenement was huddling with others for warmth in the winter, sadly reflecting on their Extreme Poverty, or coughing and starving all the time.

But still. Here he lives in a tenement. Which doesn’t tell us a lot. What kind of tenement?

There were and are different kinds of tenements in NYC. They can be put into three distinct groups: pre-law tenements, old law tenements, and new law tenements. There are some variations, but generally they get summed up like this:

1. Pre-law tenements were built prior to 1879. They were mostly built in Manhattan, and they were usually 3 rooms per apartment, with little light and no ventilation. Only one room would face the street and have a window. The inner rooms would not have windows. In the 1860s, a law was passed mandating windows for each room. So builders inserted windows between the rooms, which, as you can probably guess, accomplished precisely nothing. 

2. Old law tenements were built after the first big tenement house law of 1879. They were a little stricter on the windows. After 1879, you had to have exterior windows. But the law didn’t specify where windows had to be, so somebody designed what was called the “dumbbell” tenement. The “dumbbell” tenement looked like this:image 

Note that the kitchen has two doors, one to another bedroom, one to the hall. It also opens onto a room along the exterior of the building (the living room if you’re living in the front, and a bedroom if you’re living in the back). Also note that the window in the kitchen is tiny because even though it technically faces the exterior, that exterior is just a small airshaft. Which people ended up dumping their garbage in. So. So much for ventilation.

Finally, we get:

3. New law tenements. These were built after 1901, and maybe we can thank Jacob Riis for them, I don’t know. I have a lot of relatives who still live in what were once new law tenements, but they call them “pre-war” because that sounds nicer. They are still, strictly speaking, fairly crappy in terms of design, but they were an improvement. Any room in a tenement built after 1901 had to have at least one window opening directly onto the street or a yard or court. So no more garbage shaft windows. And no more design that rested on inner rooms with no possible air or light source.

Finally, the same 1901 act that created new law tenements upgraded the old law tenements. It required that old law tenement owners at least adapt their buildings a little to provide more ventilation. You know what that means: the addition of useless interior windows. 

So why is this all interesting to me in light of this concept art?

Because this art doesn’t just put Steve in a tenement; it puts him in an older tenement. I’d say an old law “dumbbell” tenement is likeliest, probably upgraded to include interior windows after 1901. His kitchen has two doors: one could open onto another bedroom (or two), and the door off to the side could access the hall. He doesn’t appear to have a window in his kitchen, but for all we know he could have a tiny aperture tucked behind the cabinets that accesses some kind of inner shaft — a “window” for purposes of the 1879 law.

Also, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t live alone. 

It’s pretty momentous that I’m saying this. I’m the biggest ever hater of Steve and Bucky’s Lovenest. Like. The biggest. When people tell me that it’s irrefutable “canon” that Steve lived with Bucky, I calmly nod and then resort to my hate corner sipping on my haterade throwing a hate ball, rolling in my hate. I won’t go over why I think the TWS film doesn’t mandate that they have to live together. I’ll just put it out there: I don’t enjoy a reading that insists on it. I like Steve and Bucky, I like them together, but a dynamic that insists they absolutely did move in together and that there was no other purpose for the flashback scene but to toss them into the same bed space is… not how I read that movie. 

But I have to give it to everyone who was writing that fic: they could share an apartment. Hell, Steve is probably sharing his apartment with someone, or maybe even two someones. Let’s look at that floorplan again, this time marked a little differently:

image

Whether you think he’s in the front of the building or the back, the bedroom for Steve appears to be what’s marked as the ‘parlor’ (which, hey, he gets fire escape access, good for him). So someone else will probably be in the other room, the room that the door in the kitchen/living room opens onto. Is it Bucky? Arnie Roth? Both of them? Bucky and Bucky’s sister? Two randos Steve met on the subway one day? Maybe the Barnes family lives in the front-facing apartment and Steve moved into the back to be close to them?

I figure any of these options will work if you want to write fic that takes this concept art into account; the point is really that Steve has a whole other room in there, and he’s presumably doing something with it. Maybe it’s an art studio and he does live alone. Maybe it is, in fact, Bucky’s room. I don’t think this stuff forecloses any possibilities; that’s what’s fun about it. Steve’s apartment can still say whatever you want it to say about him.

(For me, it’s interesting to think about him in an apartment that reflects decades and decades of the least amount of legally-mandated benefit to people. Welcome to the U S A. Would you like a garbage shaft building? Your options are a garbage shaft building.)

thecostumetrailer:

“The most difficult thing I had to achieve in this film was creating the fabric for the Captain America Stealth Suit.  The Russos were very specific that they wanted a suit that was made of textured, woven, hard fabric like a Kevlar and not a printed stretch suit like you see over and over again in these films. But in reality it needed to be made of a stretch fabric that would allow movement and comfort, as well as the ability to be constructed into a more realistic military type trouser and protective top. I went through many incarnations of printed textures on stretch which then posed a whole new set of challenges and problems.  The HD cameras made raised textures strobe or moiré.  So finding the right one became a trial.  Then the printing ink would shine like plastic, which I disliked.  It took four months of research and development to create a texture that seems so simple and was yet, so complicated.” – Judianna Makovsky