Latest Posts by microcheap - Page 5

israel has now officially been announced as one of the countries participating in eurovision 2024

meanwhile russia is still banned, for the third year in a row. the double standard is just sickening

Hey, reminder that one of the reasons humanity has been able to flourish is because we formed societies and helped support each other. Complete independence and self reliance is a myth to try to get you to buy more things. Please reach out. Please connect yourself. There is no reason you have to do things alone.

In loving memory of Bernard Cribbins 1928-2022 ↳ 14x01: The Star Beast || 14x02: Wild Blue Yonder

Nine Types of Industrial Pollution I 2023 I Mixed media on canvas I 210x140cm/210x180cm/210x180cm

@staff @support @engineering @music @books

Have you ever considered this is a really stupid layout to have when there’s no way to easily get your account back if you accidentally hit the wrong button???

edit: omg i’m a fool pill but not pull 😭😭

edit edit: pill bug** please why can’t i spellll

ai covers make me so uncomfortable dude. like i know hearing characters or creators sing songs is cool cause its like wow youve never heard them do that that sound cool but like man if that was my voice and people did that id be fucking ill. that would make me so anxious that people were using my voice to make whatever they wanted to hear even if it was nothing malicious. ‘wow that sounded so good, x has so much potential if they did this!’ well they didnt. because they didnt want to. and it wouldnt sound like that anyway cause its fucking ai. but you made them do it anyway i guess

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

We need kink at pride because “kink” isn’t just kink. “Kink” is:

That boy wearing jeans that are too tight

Your neighbors and their “friend” that lives with them

Having a beard and wearing a skirt

Wearing any kind of choker

Literally anything else they decide goes against the “norm”, and it can be literally anything. That is why we need kink at pride.

TV Executives: “if the strike goes on, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”

Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.

Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.

you gotta respect italy for sending every type of gay in the lgbt spectrum within the past ten years

KING

MARCOLINO SEI IL MIO CIPOLLINO i love him, i literally love him, HE GOT EMOTIONAL I CAN'T AAAAAAA

EDIT: HE GOT ON THE STAGE WITH A RAINBOW FLAG IM CRYING HELP I WANNA PROTECT HIM AT ALL COSTS PLEASE HE'S THE BEST

"I'm still here...I'm alive" I love Marco lmao

seriously?? already?? it's over??? it's not even midnight?? wtff cmon i wanted to stay up till three in the fuckin morning and complaiiinnnn

Eurovision PSA

Just a reminder that Poland (the country) doesn't want you to vote for Poland during Eurovision 2023.

The whole fuckery that happened can be summarized shortly as:

The "jury" way of voting in our country has been introduced three days before the competition.

The song chosen by the jury was not what people chose in popular vote (the difference was staggering and supposedly as high as 35k : 8k votes)

The mother of Blanka's supposed "boyfriend" was the head of the jury

Her dance choreographer was also on the jury

She won only by the jury vote as you can imagine

Her song was promoted left and right

We wanted the song disqualified but nobody listened to us

What we wanted to go through is here:

So yeah, don't vote Poland, thank you

truly evil shit

Hi Mr. Gaiman, I've seen a few tweets and posts about not crossing the picket line for the WGA strike but nothing actually explaining what that entails for this strike? Is it not watching streaming services since that's one of the main issues? All tv? TV and movies? only new stuff or reruns too?

No, it's to not cross the picket lines literally. If there's a writers guild picket in place, you don't cross it. (But you can always join it -- especially if you are in LA or NYC.)

The WGA hasn't called for a boycott of streaming services or TV or anything like that, and until and unless they do I wouldn't push for that.

What the WGA would like is for people to make their support for the writers clear and loud -- write to the networks you watch on and tell them to treat their writers fairly, post your support on every social media outlet you can. Let the producers know that public opinion is against them.

hot fucking take but instead of the 'Jason settling down and agreeing that killing is bad always' give me a Jason who drastically cuts back on who he kills but STILL kills. give me a Jason after a long and messy reconciliation that is like 'listen Bruce, i get it, you're too good and too kind and too goddamn hopeful to believe that some people are just rotten to the core. that's ok, i get it now, and i'll do it for you. because i'm not good like you. i'll kill the people that won't change, i'll be what Gotham needs sometimes, the one thing you can't bring yourself to be' and he's not even mad. everyone says Robin's the brightness to Batman's darkness but Jason didn't come back as Robin, he's fine with being the knife in the dark, the real monster.

and a Bruce who is utterly gutted by this. he wants Jason to never kill because he remembers the bright little boy who would have hated what he became, wants Jason to not kill because he never wants Jason to wake up loathing himself for the blood on his hands and not just because he can't stand the philosophy that some people aren't worth saving he knows Jason doesn't think of himself as good most days and he doesn't think this philosophy is helping that any.

they're two ships always passing the night and never quite meeting but goddamn they build bridges and long as they have to be to stay in each other's lives.

Read more:

The Mary Sue

INTERVIEW: Ben Barnes Loves the Dark Characters but Would Love a Rom-Com Too

We asked Ben Barnes about the roles he takes on during the round table discussions for season 2 of 'Shadow and Bone' on Netflix!

Who wants to join my "Cast Ben Barnes in a romcom right now" committee?

Are you trapped on tumblr right now?

Is there something you planned to do before you got trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?

Are you yelling at yourself to get up and do the thing, but you can’t, because you’re trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?

Consider this your save point.

Put tumblr down, stand up, stretch, and go do the thing you planned to do. Future you will be incredibly grateful.

polls are great but the little "lack of engagement" sentiment that kinda flared up when they dropped was soooo weird. "why aren't you guys reblogging!!! this isn't how this site works you have to share things so more people see them!!!". how can you genuinely believe people are obligated to reblog your post just because they clicked one button to vote in your poll? i think if your post was funnier people would want to reblog it more but it's never that it's "too many new people who don't know how this site works". man even if the funniest, most culturally significant post of all fucking time dropped tomorrow not a single person is obligated to reblog it if they don't want to. get over yourself

Do you ever eat popcorn out of the palm of your own hand with such ardent desperation that you feel like both a wild horse and the gentle schoolgirl feeding it treats to gain its affection 

look me in the eyes. you are aware some asexual people have sex, right. you are aware some asexuals aren’t sex repulsed. you do not need to baby asexuals and act like the slightest mention of anything sexual will cause them to die of a heart attack 

it is. so weird to me that I'm having to say this again after a real-life cartoon supervillian already once ran for president on a platform of hatred & fascism and won, but.

it's November, please fucking vote

Lately I've been thinking about the ways that families, and society, just aren't taught to celebrate queer people.

Probably the most significant life change that my sister experienced as a young adult was getting married to her husband. They are both lovely people, and their marriage was celebrated by an expensive formal ceremony surrounded by friends and family. There was catering and beautiful clothing and a hired band and dancing and photographers. My sister and her husband were surrounded by people who loved them, and were expressing their love and their joy. It was considered normal and natural for the occasion to be marked, and marked well.

The most significant life change I've experienced to this point in adulthood has been coming out as trans. Like my sister, I bought outfits for the occasion (but wardrobe essentials rather than a wedding dress). Also like my sister, I filled out paperwork to change my legal name (although the process was significantly longer and more expensive in my case, and the change was met with confusion and annoyance rather than congratulations). The similarities ended there. There was no party. No one congratulated me. There was no sense of celebration. Just the relief of "Thank hell the paperwork's over with," and the exhaustion of having to repeatedly remind disinterested relatives about names and pronouns and Gender Studies 101. Years later, most of my family still misgenders me behind my back, and frequently to my face. Not "on purpose." They just don't care enough to learn.

But hot damn, coming out means something, motherfucker. Queer self-discovery is hard and it is long, and it is an achievement. It deserves to be recognized, and to be celebrated.

Looking back, I wish I had celebrated. I wish I had dressed up and insisted on a family dinner at a nice restaurant. I wish I had told people to send me congratulatory greeting cards. I wish I had demanded to be celebrated. But it didn't occur to me, much less to my family members. That's the extent to which we are taught to ignore the significance of queer experiences. I went through a journey that transformed my life, and it didn't even occur to me to celebrate.

And even if it had, I would have had to celebrate alone, at least in spirit. Because the same people who were so excited to show up and celebrate my sister's marriage, this major milestone of her adulthood, just fundamentally did not care about the milestone I had reached. They barely acknowledged it; it didn't match their own experiences, and so they didn't recognize its importance. Crucially: they didn't offer me congratulations or celebration, because they were never taught to. And that's a pile of rubbish. All this to say:

Celebrate queer family & friends with the same gusto you celebrate cishets.

Bitch.

my sister was 8 years old when morality police in Tehran stopped us because she wasn’t wearing a headscarf. Dad tried to tell them, she’s only 8, it’s not mandatory until she’s 10, but it didn’t matter to him because she “looked” older. She was forced to wear a scarf before he let us go.

"Don't spy on a privacy lab" (and other career advice for university provosts)

This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It’s a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the “shitty technology adoption curve.”

What’s the “shitty tech adoption curve?” It’s the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with tech — say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 — you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.

That’s why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. Following this pathway lets shitty tech peddlers knock the rough edges off their wares, inuring us all to their shock and offense.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

20 years ago, if you ate dinner under the unblinking eye of a CCTV, it was because you were housed in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you were unwise enough to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for “home automation” from Google, Apple, Amazon or another “luxury surveillance” vendor.

Northeastern’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute,” where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If there’s one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.

Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern Senior Vice Provost for Research David Luzzi decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. Luzzi signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being.

Students throughout ISEC were alarmed by this move, but especially students on the sixth floor, home to the Privacy Institute. When they demanded an explanation, they were told that the university was conducting a study on “desk usage.” This rang hollow: students at the Privacy Institute have assigned desks, and they badge into each room when they enter it.

As Privacy Institute PhD candidate Max von Hippel wrote, “Reader, we have assigned desks, and we use a key-card to get into the room, so, they already know how and when we use our desks.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048837746204672

So why was the university suddenly so interested in gathering fine-grained data on desk usage? I asked von Hippel and he told me: “They are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students. Because as you know, research always works best when you have to schedule your thinking time.”

That’s von Hippel’s theory, and I’m going to go with it, because Luzzi didn’t offer a better one in the flurry of memos and “listening sessions” that took place after the ISEC students arrived at work one morning to discover sensors under their desks.

This is documented in often hilarious detail in von Hippel’s thread on the scandal, in which the university administrators commit a series of unforced errors and the grad students run circles around them, in a comedy of errors straight out of “Animal House.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048652215431168

After the sensors were discovered, the students wrote to the administrators demanding their removal, on the grounds that there was no scientific purpose for them, that they intimidated students, that they were unnecessary, and that the university had failed to follow its own rules and ask the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to review the move as a human-subjects experiment.

The letter was delivered to Luzzi, who offered “an impromptu listening session” in which he alienated students by saying that if they trusted the university to “give” them a degree, they should trust it to surveil them. The students bristled at this characterization, noting that students deliver research (and grant money) to “make it tick.”

[Image ID: Sensors arrayed around a kitchen table at ISEC]

The students, believing Luzzi was not taking them seriously, unilaterally removed all the sensors, and stuck them to their kitchen table, annotating and decorating them with Sharpie. This prompted a second, scheduled “listening session” with Luzzi, but this session, while open to all students, was only announced to their professors (“Beware of the leopard”).

The students got wind of this, printed up fliers and made sure everyone knew about it. The meeting was packed. Luzzi explained to students that he didn’t need IRB approval for his sensors because they weren’t “monitoring people.” A student countered, what was being monitored, “if not people?” Luzzi replied that he was monitoring “heat sources.”

https://github.com/maxvonhippel/isec-sensors-scandal/blob/main/Oct_6_2022_Luzzi_town_hall.pdf

Remember, these are grad students. They asked the obvious question: which heat sources are under desks, if not humans (von Hippel: “rats or kangaroos?”). Luzzi fumbled for a while (“a service animal or something”) before admitting, “I guess, yeah, it’s a human.”

Having yielded the point, Luzzi pivoted, insisting that there was no privacy interest in the data, because “no individual data goes back to the server.” But these aren’t just grad students — they’re grad students who specialize in digital privacy. Few people on earth are better equipped to understand re-identification and de-aggregation attacks.

[Image ID: A window with a phrase written in marker, ‘We are not doing science here’ -Luzzi.]

A student told Luzzi, “This doesn’t matter. You are monitoring us, and collecting data for science.” Luzzi shot back, “we are not doing science here.” This ill-considered remark turned into an on-campus meme. I’m sure it was just blurted in the heat of the moment, but wow, was that the wrong thing to tell a bunch of angry scientists.

From the transcript, it’s clear that this is where Luzzi lost the crowd. He accused the students of “feeling emotion” and explaining that the data would be used for “different kinds of research. We want to see how students move around the lab.”

Now, as it happens, ISEC has an IoT lab where they take these kinds of measurements. When they do those experiments, students are required to go through IRB, get informed consent, all the stuff that Luzzi had bypassed. When this is pointed out, Luzzi says that they had been given an IRB waiver by the university’s Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).

Now a prof gets in on the action, asking, pointedly: “Is the only reason it doesn’t fall under IRB is that the data will not be published?” A student followed up by asking how the university could justify blowing $50,000 on surveillance gear when that money would have paid for a whole grad student stipend with money left over.

Luzzi’s answers veer into the surreal here. He points out that if he had to hire someone to monitor the students’ use of their desks, it would cost more than $50k, implying that the bill for the sensors represents a cost-savings. A student replies with the obvious rejoinder — just don’t monitor desk usage, then.

Finally, Luzzi started to hint at the underlying rationale for the sensors, discussing the cost of the facility to the university and dangling the possibility of improving utilization of “research assets.” A student replies, “If you want to understand how research is done, don’t piss off everyone in this building.”

Now that they have at least a vague explanation for what research question Luzzi is trying to answer, the students tear into his study design, explaining why he won’t learn what he’s hoping to learn. It’s really quite a good experimental design critique — these are good students! Within a few volleys, they’re pointing out how these sensors could be used to stalk researchers and put them in physical danger.

Luzzi turns the session over to an outside expert via a buggy Zoom connection that didn’t work. Finally, a student asks whether it’s possible that this meeting could lead to them having a desk without a sensor under it. Luzzi points out that their desk currently doesn’t have a sensor (remember, the students ripped them out). The student says, “I assume you’ll put one back.”

[Image ID: A ‘public art piece’ in the ISEC lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out ‘NO!,’ surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.]

They run out of time and the meeting breaks up. Following this, the students arrange the sensors into a “public art piece” in the lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out “NO!,” surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.

Meanwhile, students are still furious. It’s not just that the sensors are invasive, nor that they are scientifically incoherent, nor that they cost more than a year’s salary — they also emit lots of RF noise that interferes with the students’ own research. The discussion spills onto Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NEU/comments/xx7d7p/northeastern_graduate_students_privacy_is_being/

Yesterday, Luzzi capitulated, circulating a memo saying they would pull “all the desk occupancy sensors from the building,” due to “concerns voiced by a population of graduate students.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578101964960776192

The shitty technology adoption curve is relentless, but you can’t skip a step! Jumping straight to grad students (in a privacy lab) without first normalizing them by sticking them on the desks of poor kids in underfunded schools (perhaps after first laying off a computer science teacher to free up the budget!) was a huge tactical error.

A more tactically sound version of this is currently unfolding at CMU Computer Science, where grad students have found their offices bugged with sensors that detect movement and collect sound:

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721

The CMU administration has wisely blamed the presence of these devices on the need to discipline low-waged cleaning staff by checking whether they’re really vacuuming the offices.

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387426812972646403

While it’s easier to put cleaners under digital surveillance than computer scientists, trying to do both at once is definitely a boss-level challenge. You might run into a scholar like David Gray Widder, who, observing that “this seems like algorithmic management of lowly paid employees to me,” unplugged the sensor in his office.

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721

This is the kind of full-stack Luddism this present moment needs. These researchers aren’t opposed to sensors — they’re challenging the social relations of sensors, who gets sensed and who does the sensing.

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

[Image ID: A flier inviting ISEC grad students to attend an unadvertised ‘listening session’ with vice-provost David Luzzi. It is surmounted with a sensor that has been removed from beneath a desk and annotated in Sharpie to read: ‘If found by David Luzzi suck it.’]

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!)