A Team Of Rhode Island School Of Design students And Researchers Have Created Tesselated, Floating

I would put Gahlok instead but I don't have the canister handy

What, this? Oh, it’s just my Krana. Yeah, I always wear it while I clean the house, it gets me in the zone.

Man accidentally reinvents Bionicle.

it doesn't matter how much you tell tumblr that all their silly and bad features don't work and you hate them because they're not for you. they're jingling keys to dangle in front of venture capitalists, the most gullible motherfuckers on earth, so they will keep pouring money into the giant money pit that is this website. this is also why all social media websites add features pretty much

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 need more than infinite time. Like, give me a sideways timeline where I can spend forever on a specific project without time passing in the main world, but I don't need just one of those.

I need like five. I want to splinter into a bunch of different directions, all somehow at right angles to the timeline, only to slowly angle their ways back to this timeline and drop masterpieces of arbitrary amounts of work spent in these little atemporal cloisters

The Grand Folia Hotel by keysmasht

Released: February 2023

63k words; 12 chapters

Noteworthy Tags:

Status: Complete

When an Affini outpost and the object of Phoebe's spy assignment for the Rebellion turns out to be an elaborate "floret-run" hotel, she begins to wonder if she's in over her head.

Grand Folia Hotel is a fic I feel downright unqualified to speak about, because it's just downright incredible. The setting is lush and richly realized, Celosia is a terrifying and enticing force of nature, and chapter 10 hits like a goddamn freight train. The fic feels downright platonic in a way. Like, if one were to wish for an ideal version of an HDG story, a kindly genie might produce something that looks an awful lot like Grand Folia Hotel. I lack the expertise on Wes Anderson to say if the name is more than simply a cute play on words, but it would not surprise me.

in the future, Braiding Sweetgrass will be assigned to all students to read in school, and mostly they will hate it, because it seems to them like poorly structured rambling about nature and vignettes from the author's life. Soooooooo boring!

We will struggle to explain to them: no, no, this book was actually completely revolutionary for its time. When Kimmerer talks about the honorable harvest, learning to listen to the teachings of the plants, understanding nature as animate and alive, and the relationship of reciprocity and mutual dependence between humans and other life forms, these are ideas that were genuinely new and mind-blowing to us when we were young.

It wasn't just those in power that saw nature as "Resources" or some kind of mechanical system that would be better off without human interference—almost no one else knew another way to think. Yes, yes, we knew about symbiosis, but we hardly ever applied it to ourselves. Kimmerer is serious when she says her cultural perspective was almost wiped out; the culture we inherited as children literally didn't have the concepts she is talking about, and that's why the book was so important!

We will tell the students that it would have been weird even among "environmentalists" of the time to think of trees and insects as your family. I mean, well, yes, we knew that everything was related, but we thought Charles Darwin was the first to come up with that. You don't understand, we will say, most of these ideas about living in right relationship with nature would have been thought of as extra-scientific, sentimental or spiritual crap.

"Did you just not know where food and clothes came from?" they will ask, with eyebrows raised. Yes, but back then, food was mostly grown in enormous fields of only one crop where everything else had been killed with chemicals. We didn't really think of agricultural environments as "ecosystems"—"nature" was a separate thing—I mean yeah, we harvested logs from forests, but that was different. No, we basically thought Earth was divided into "human uses" and "nature," and that people shouldn't be in the "nature" parts. No, really!

The students will be fascinated and ask things like "But what about parks?" "Would a hay field be nature or human uses?" "How about pollinator gardens?" "What about the ocean?" and we will try to explain to them that we really just didn't think that hard about it

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”