Goldieslearning - Big Plans, Baby!

I decided to make some positive translation memes

[ID: a picture of kitten looking at a phone edited to be crying and surrounded by heart emoji with text reading 'when a translator worked hard for me to be able to access a piece of media']

Progress doesn't happen over night, but sometimes if you flip your mindset enough at once it can.

An example:

What if, tomorrow morning, you woke up bright and early. You did skincare and hair care. You made yourself a smoothie, did 20 minutes of yoga, cleaned your house, went to the gym, stretched, made a delicious lunch to take to work, showered, went to work, came home and made a nutritious dinner. Then, you prepped a salad for tomorrow's lunch, slurped downs protein shake, and finished up your laundry. And you soaked your sore feet in Epsom salts and oils and rose petals and you watched your favorite show with a glass of whatever suits you.

Sometimes all it takes, truthfully, is ONE day of saying "I'm doing it" and you actually do it. You actually stick to your lists and your goals and you feel great. And then the next day you feel so great you do it again.

Then the weekend comes, and you look at your to do list going "oh God what didn't I do" and your list was clear. So you go out for coffee with your friends and sit at the park with a book in hand and get excited for tomorrow. Because now you have plans.

Make tomorrow that day.

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

Visual Scientist

reminder that the hit star trek voyager episode “threshold” in which the captain and the pilot go too fast, turn into lizards, and have lizard babies together, won an emmy

Stay motivated

JONATHAN HORWITZ

this next cup of coffee will fix me

tips for applying to colleges as a 21 year old?

Apply using the Coalition Application to save money and take special care to apply to colleges that have no application fee outside of the Coalition App. Go out of your way to apply to as many places as you possibly can and just have fun with your applications. I would apply to a variety of large state schools and smaller liberal arts colleges and have a huge mix going on so that your application pool is large and relatively varied. Apply to some huge SEC schools, apply to some cute liberal arts schools, apply to colleges with a few great scholarships, apply to colleges that you idolise, take the time to just have fun and apply all over the map. I applied to the American University of Bulgaria just for the thrill of it and I don’t regret a single application. Most colleges consider January 15th the last day to do applications but some have rolling admissions so try to get on that right now and get to applying to schools.

Don’t be afraid to move far and start anew, there’s nothing like a fresh beginning and you can be whoever you want to be. There’s no shame in moving away and getting away from your old reputation and recreating yourself, there’s no shame in making new friends and forgetting that you used to be shy and fearful, and there’s no shame in taking full advantage of all of your new opportunities. There’s no reason why you should refrain from moving and becoming your best self in a brand new city and making the choice to become who you were always meant to be and enjoying your life. I know so many women who had total glow ups and took the time to get thin, change their style, and fix what was hurt upstairs before they went to college as older students and I’ve seen how they’ve succeeded and actually ended up giving life another fair chance.

Apply for all of the grants and scholarships that you possibly can so you’ll have an excess. I used to apply for a huge amount of scholarships just so I could have an excess and spend it on the things that I wanted and so I could use my scholarship money to help fill out my savings account and offset my cost of living. If you get scholarships and you already have your tuition on lock, a lot of the time the money will just be given to you in check form, same with grants. I used to use the money that I got from grants to buy clothes and travel just so that I could continue improving my quality of life. Life is for living and college is for fun and if you have the ability to win scholarships and grants, some of the funds should be used for your own enjoyment and your savings account, not everything should be so serious.

Rush a sorority. I’m telling you. Rushing a sorority truly changed my life and has given me friends and so many opportunities that I would have never had had I not chosen to go through rush. My sorority has changed me and changed my life, it’s given me purpose, and it’s helped me get so many career opportunities and become friends with women who I literally would not be able to survive without. My sorority has given me access to so many things, I’ve been able to learn so much, I was helped with scholarships and with learning better English, my sorority has helped me through the hard parts of life, I’ve been able to learn and experience history, I regret not going to a school that gave me the ability to Go Greek for four years and have that family. I’m constantly recommending that women go through rush and I would strongly recommend that any older first year at university go through rush just so that she could have the ability to make friends and have all of the same benefits that I’ve been blessed enough to have. I’d consider Going Greek my best decision ever.

Go on tours!! So many colleges give you the chance to tour free, so many are easily accessible, and so many are accessible with minimal money spent and so my advice is to try to tour all of your top colleges and get a feel for where you want to be. Tours, having the opportunity to experience a college, and having the ability to see the campus and witness the culture are really what can make or break your decision. I’m a huge proponent of trying to go somewhere and trying to see what’s up before you make the decision to spend four years in said place. Going on tours helped me, I got to meet cool new people and have even cooler walks on the campuses where I went, and I got to have the time on campus that helped me decide if the university was for me or not. I did this with the schools I applied to for my year abroad and for my actual undergraduate uni and I had the ability to fall in love with both campuses. Tours are an essential part of applying to colleges and I would highly recommend doing affordable uni tours.

“Why do we persist in thinking about gender differences? I think it’s telling to think about who benefits, when we think about why this research is even being done. Why is anyone trying to prove that there are innate differences between men and women in intelligence, scientific ability, competitiveness, or any other traits that seem to confer high status in society? One general reason to cling to the idea of innate ability is to give ourselves an excuse for not being good at something. If I claim that I just have no natural aptitude for sports, that gives me an excuse for being very, very bad at sports. Conversely, when people declare that I am very talented at the piano, that negates the thousands of hours of practice I have put in. People can declare themselves to be a right-brained, “creative” person, and use that as an excuse for being disorganised. They can boast of being a left-brained, “logical” person, and use that as an excuse for being insensitive. (This is in spite of the fact that the left-/right-brain theory has been largely debunked.) The more invidious reason to claim that people are born with certain traits is to avoid having to help people do any better. This is a way of not having to address our prejudices. If we can somehow argue that women are innately less intelligent than men, then we won’t have to address issues of inequality in education, science, business, politics, and every echelon of power. If “innate” biological differences are found, they become fodder for people who seek a pseudo-rational basis to maintain structures that discriminate against women.”

— Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender