Resources-and-reminders - Resources

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Something that literally changed my life was working with a friend on a coding thing. He was helping me create an auto rig script and was trying to explain something to me but his words were just turning into static in my brain. I was tired and confused and there was so many new concepts happening.

I could feel myself working toward a crying meltdown and was getting preemptively ashamed of what was about to happen when he said, “Hey, are you someone who benefits from breaks?”

It broke me.

Did I benefit from breaks? I didn’t know. I’d never taken them.

When a problem frustrated or upset me I just gritted my teeth and plowed through the emotional distress because eventually if you batter and flail at something long enough you figure it out. So what if you get bruised on the way.

I viscerally remembered in that moment being forced to sit at the table late into the night with my dad screaming at me, trying to understand math. I remembered taking that with me into adulthood and having breakdowns every week trying to understand coding. I could have taken a break? Would it help? I didn’t know! I’d never taken one!

“Yes,” I told him. We paused our call. I ate lunch. I focused on other stuff for half an hour. I came back in a significantly better state of mind, and the thing he’d been trying to explain had been gently cooking in the back of my head and seemed easier to understand.

Now when I find myself gritting my teeth at problems I can hear his gentle voice asking if I benefit from breaks. Yes, dear god, yes why did I never get taught breaks? Why was the only way I knew to keep suffering until something worked?

I was relating to this same friend recently my roadtrip to the redwoods with my wife. “We stopped every hour or so to get out and stretch our legs and switch drivers. It was really nice. When I was a kid we’d just drive twelve hours straight and not stop for anything, just gas. We’d eat in the car and power through.”

He gave a wry smile, immediately connecting the mindset of my parents on a road trip to what they’d instilled in me about brute forcing through discomfort. “Do you benefit from breaks?” he echoed, drawing my attention to it, making me smile with the same sad acknowledgement.

Take breaks. You’re allowed. You don’t have to slam into problems over and over and over, let yourself rest. It will get easier. Take. Breaks.

i want to shake many young women and say you can grow in private. and what i mean by that is that you don’t have to publicly self-flagellate when you don’t know something or when you say something a little insensitive or whatever else. you don’t have to report your Bad Thoughts and Ignorance to the crowd who waits to judge you. you do not have to pay penance. you do not have to issue public statements. nothing more is gained from burying yourself in shame than you could gain by thinking “oh i don’t know about this” and looking it up real quick, or thinking “hm, that wasn’t how i want to behave, i’ll do different next time” and then moving on with your life. no need to choke yourself with it.

One of the most healing things I’ve strove (striven?) to do in my life is viewing sex as just another thing people do, among a host of other things like eating and pooping and playing with cats.

Our entire society, feminists and puritans alike, pushes the idea that sex is uniquely powerful and dangerous, capable of inflicting The Worst Trauma or the Highest Fulfillment, and that’s…just flat out untrue. Other experiences can cause similar trauma: violence, disasters, war, instability. Other experiences can result in transcendent pleasure: trance states, live music, non-sexual intimacy, tattoos.

I think this is where the disconnect in perception about sex positivity comes from, because the phrase itself makes people who already view sex as being uniquely powerful think sex positivity means viewing sex as uniquely good, when actually…it’s mostly about taking sex off that pedestal. Normalizing sex. Making it into just another thing people do. Because that’s the first step in making sure people can engage with sex on their own terms in a healthy way.

Taking sex off its cultural pedestal was the thing that allowed me to overcome the deeply-instilled shame I developed from being raised within Christian purity culture, and from being queer, and from existing as a woman. I think a failure to do that, in feminist circles, often leads to an overblowing of the (very real) harm that sex has the potential to do at the exclusion of other problems facing women and other marginalized groups, which often leads to more shaming rhetoric - just rhetoric that shames different people for different reasons.

Sex is not the enemy and it’s not our savior. It’s just one more thing people can do with their bodies.

On Voting in America

So one of the most profound comments on routine chores that I've ever encountered was, hilariously, the Pickle Rick episode of "Rick & Morty," where (after a lot of shenanigans have already ensued) this therapist absolutely lays Rick out:

"I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is: it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."

I think about this at least once a week — usually while I'm doing my laundry or sweeping or some other task that needs doing and won't get me anything more than clean clothing or a dog-hair-free floor. There's no Pulitzer for wiping down your microwave or scrubbing your toilet; no one's awarding you for getting all the dishes out of the sink. At best you have the satisfaction of crossing it off your list.

Voting is very much the same (and I'm talking about the US here, as an American). Sure, you sometimes get a sticker; but nobody's going to cheer for you. There's no adventure here, no potential for anything more than crossing something off of a list. It's a chore, something that needs doing in order to repair, maintain, and yes even clean. So I get why people don't like doing it.

And I've decided I don't give a shit.

Do it anyway. Your country takes astonishingly little from you — taxes, the once-in-a-blue-moon jury duty, and a theoretical draft that hasn't been used in over half a century and likely will never be again — but it asks you (asks! not requires! not demands!) to vote once a year. It's not always easy; especially in conservative states, the impediments to vote can be ridiculous. But it is once a year and unlike in our nation's all-too-recent past, you will not die if you do it.

In fact, the worst outcome from voting these days is that the person or issue that you vote for loses — but you won't know if they lose until after the election. Polls are less accurate now, for a whole host of reasons; you cannot know until after the election who or what will win. This makes your vote more valuable than possibly ever before.

Use that power. Not because it's exciting or even rewarding, but because your vote is what keeps our country's metaphorical teeth from falling out and our metaphorical ass from stinking.

Brush, wipe, vote.

learning how to get out of the victim mindset and approach situations from the student perspective is changing the entire trajectory of my life. i am learning how to stand up for myself i am learning how to make decisions i am learning how to express my feelings i am learning how to live

stop letting miserable people on the internet convince you that you must have a concrete, well-constructed opinion on everything that has ever existed.

oops! it seems i tripped and dropped several million free books, papers, and other resources

https://annas-archive.org

https://sci-hub.se

https://z-lib.is

https://libgen.is

https://libgen.rs

https://www.pdfdrive.com

https://library.memoryoftheworld.org

https://monoskop.org/Monoskop

https://libcom.org

https://libretexts.org

http://classics.mit.edu

https://librivox.org

https://standardebooks.org

https://www.gutenberg.org

https://core.ac.uk

The sign of high quality is the fact the book was banned by the government. Trash literature NEVER EVER had any troubles with the law.

i mean this in the gentlest way possible: you need to eat vegetables. you need to become comfortable with doing so. i do not care if you are a picky eater because of autism (hi, i used to be this person!), you need to find at least some vegetables you can eat. find a different way to prepare them. chances are you would like a vegetable you hate if you prepared it in a stew or roasted it with seasoning or included it as an ingredient in a recipe. just. please start eating better. potatoes and corn are not sufficient vegetables for a healthy diet.