“My Standpoint Is Armed Neutrality.”

Contrapoints, “Decrypting the Alt-right”

a hard pill to swallow: if an audience can pick up on where the story is going, it’s a good story.

do u ever realise that you’re gonna be an adult for the rest of your life

“When we set children against one another in contests - from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science “fairs” (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honour rolls to prizes for the best painting or the most books read - we teach them to confuse excellence with winning, as if the only way to do something well is to outdo others. We encourage them to measure their own value in terms of how many people they’ve beaten, which is not exactly a path to mental health. We invite them to see their peers not as potential friends or collaborators but as obstacles to their own success… Finally, we lead children to regard whatever they’re doing as a means to an end: The point isn’t to paint or read or design a science experiment, but to win. The act of painting, reading, or designing is thereby devalued in the child’s mind.”

— Alfie Kohn, The Myth Of The Spoiled Child

the biggest lesson im learning is that nothing is as extreme or as permanent as our emotions convince us they are. nothing is certain and things are always fluctuating and there are always exceptions and there are always mistakes. there is always pain and there is always love. everything is a delicate touch away from changing

The best writing teacher I ever had wasn’t the one who taught me grammar and spelling. He wasn’t the one who taught me outlining and paragraph structure, nor was he the one who taught me about themes, motifs, and symbolism.

He said, “Wiggle your pencil.

Put the tip of your pencil to the paper and keep the eraser end wiggling.

If you have nothing to write, write that: I have nothing to write, I have nothing to write, I have nothing to write, I have nothing to write, and eventually, by force of boredom, something else will come out.”

We would take 30 - 45 minutes every day to ‘wiggle our pencils’ in our wide-ruled notebooks, during which time, he was silent except to remind anyone who stopped to keep that pencil moving. 

I finished not one but two novel-length stories that year. It was fifth grade.

Wiggle your pencil.

Dreamscaping

Claudia Bueno is an artist born in Venezuela, now based in the USA, whose light art installations will tease and tantalise all your senses. Bueno works with circuits and motors to create ethereal installations which play with light, sound and touch, creating immersive art which is psychedelic and magical in nature.