Why Do Your Homework When You Can *reads The Entire Hurt/comfort Section*

the folklore studies students

telling stories on long winter nights

a reverence for information passed down from generation to generation

the original grimm’s fairytales on your bookshelf

being fascinated by oral forms of storytelling

fighting to have the importance of folklore traditions recognized, rather than dismissed

the warmth of human conversation

comparing various communities and cultures

a love for the art of storytelling

understanding the importance, through context, of seemingly trivial traditions

studying anthropology and literature to supplement your work

the gentle flickering of a candle flame

appreciating the whimsical details of life

folklore as a vehicle for reflecting on the world

analyzing the messages behind myths and fables

the power of cultural heritage to counteract oppression

a stack of folklore anthologies with your favorite pages marked

finding deep significance in a simple legend or story

wanting to make folk culture and traditions more widely recognized and understood

examining the many different versions of a single tale

a fascination with all forms of communication and expression

Free places to learn astronomy from

Making this for my fellow broke passionate people

https://www.coursera.org/learn/astro

https://www.teachastronomy.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/astropedia/videos

(these first 3 are basically the same shit but different platforms)

I will keep reblogging each time I find something new

hahahaha so i ended up not sleeping at all. stress and energy drinks dont mix well. welp i guess ill start day 4 early. its 5 am rn so i can get a lot of stuff done!!

3/100

for some reason this day felt like 3

so i woke up and started taking astronomy notes

watched motivational clips only cause i was feeling pretty down

tried to make a to do list but i didnt manage to do much. I argued with my mom and that truly killed my mood to do anything, so i just took a nap

after the nap i went out

and when i came home i wrote a poem and submitted it for a magazine!!! I am actually pretty nervous about this one, its the first time doing anything like this

also i had some pretty neat ideas for the plot of a story im working on so i wrote them down

anyways now im just sitting in bed cause i got a sharp pain on the side. it doesnt phase me that much its just annoying at this point

i might try to read something before going to bed, it's 2 am and i doubt i can sleep

tomorrow im getting the exam results, i think ill share them and my thoughts on it :D

I’ve seen a lot of posts on my dash tonight about users who are threatening suicide, with other Tumblr members posting in effort to try to get ahold of them. I think you all should see this:

IF THERE IS EVER A TUMBLR USER WHO HAS POSTED A GOOD-BYE MESSAGE, SUICIDE NOTE, VIDEO, OR ANYTHING OF THE SORT, PLEASE FOLLOW THIS POST.

1. Scroll to the top of your dashboard.

2. See the circular question mark icon at the top? It’s the third one over from your home symbol. Click on that, and a screen similar to the one in the picture will come up.

3. Where you can type in questions, the box with the magnifying glass at the top, type in the word “suicide.”

4. Click on the first link that shows up. It should say, “Pass the URL of the blog on to us.”

5. Type in the user’s URL and tell Tumblr admin that the user is contemplating suicide and has posted a message indicating that they are going through with it or will be attempting. Hit send! Tumblr administration will perform a number of actions to contact the user and take the necessary steps to prevent the suicide.

TUMBLR: THIS COULD SAVE A USER’S LIFE. PLEASE DO NOT IGNORE SUICIDE THREATS.

Reblog this to keep other users aware. Suicide isn’t a joke, and neither is someone’s life. If you didn’t know this, someone else may not, either. Pass it on.

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

I HAVE AN EYE INFECTION AND I CANT SEE CLEARLY AND I THOUGHT THE MAN WAS WILL GRAHAM

I WAS SO CONFUSED LIKE WHY THE HELL IS WILL TALKING WITH BABY YODA

I CAN'T

- Nikos Kazantzakis

so i found this pic in my gallery

not me taking a break from instagram and accidentally getting addicted to tumblr

not me

run bish

it took me one minute to read this,,,,

please use paragraphs next time

🥺

That adhd(?) feel when instead of reading long text like a normal human your eyes decide to skip across sentences and read whatever it wants like the uncontrollable heathens they are and you take 3000000000x longer to read something because every few words you gotta force yourself to go back to actually read the sentence in chronological order. In fact, I’m convinced the reading lever in my brain is set to “best stuff first” and if anyone knows how to turn it off that’d be great

Free Education Resource List

Coursera - a generally good platform, from what I’ve heard. Like most other things, you can’t get actual certificates for free, but the courses *usually* are. Here’s a list of the ~1400 courses where everything but the certificate is free. This list has some pretty enticing courses, like an intro to classical music composition, Greek and Roman mythology, Russian history, astronomy, physical chemistry, and a lot more. The enrollment option you want is called Full Course, No Certificate.

YouTube - Never underestimate the power of things most people have access to. YouTube is an incredibaly powerful tool when it comes to learning things, particularly for things like science and math. My favorite educational channel is Crash Course, which might sound cliché because literally every AP World History class ever uses them, but I’ve literally spent hours watching their videos and taking notes. Just watching a bit of the biology series got me to test out of a lesson in my online bio course this year, which was super helpful.

Another good resource on YouTube is anything art. My favorite surprisingly education channel for drawing specifically is DrawingWiffWaffles, because she explains what she’s doing and why as she’s doing it.

Wikihow - another good resource people make over look because it seems obvious. Material on here I would cross reference with something else, because this can be edited by anyone (I’m pretty sure) and it can get a little shady, but I know there was a physics article that helped me understand electrons so much better.

Math Is Fun - a really solid, simple resource for math, particularly if you struggle a lot. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the site and their use of comic sans, there’s quite a lot of information to be found here. It helped me learn calculus, of all things.

Wikipedia - Once again, since anyone can edit this I would cross reference the information you get here with something else, but in all honesty this Wikipedia is my go to for literally everything. There’s unbridled power and pure, unabridged knowledge here, and I will milk it for everything it’s worth. I’ve used Wikipedia for everything from factoring quadratic equations (something I have a strange amount of trouble understanding) to astrobiology to linguistics to the Bohemian Reformation (which resulted in me writing an essay for my history teacher that *almost* saved my grade).

Local libraries are also usually very good centers for learning. I know the one in my town holds a lot of in-person classes (not at the moment) and provides card-holders with a free membership to Universal Class as well as some other online education platforms.

Anyone and everyone can reblog with stuff I missed!