Mad Hatter

LOL sounds all too familiar. Usually I was in the meetings as well, actually solving the problem while management was jabbering away. Sometimes in meetings with 50+ people. 🙄 That is really cool! Especially when everyone comes to you with their urgent problems and it's all the most urgent. 😛 That's awesome! Even if it seems like you get a lot of Dilbert moments at least you get really appreciated for your good work. It makes such a big difference! Most important question - what kind of pancakes?

Very relatable.

Had a good handstand session yesterday! Today I'm very, very tired after several days of sleeping even worse than usual. Challenge of the day is to not listen to my brain and spiral.

Tahchin and zereshk polo. I never tried to make it myself so can't give you specific recipes to try, and there's many of different variations. The ones I've had have been with chicken, but it's also possible to make the rice as a side to something else, or add other stuff. Oh and Iranian ice cream is reeeeally good too, not with barberries (I think they're traditionally only used for for savoury dishes for some reason) but rather with rose water and pistachios. Delicious!

It's a great word, that's enough of a reason.

I'm curious now, does the video really show black bottom? I don't know much about it (and most of it is lost anyway) but I associate it with a looser, more grounded dance. Lots more hips and shoulders and bent knees. And booty/knee slapping, which definitely doesn't seem Nightingale approved. 😄 But maybe this is what it looked like when white people danced it in couples...

Completely get it! When I tried to sort through what I like I ended up with styles that are literally the completely opposites. Useless! 😄 One way to deal with it could be to simply try each style and apply it to your own work. Steal the color palettes that you like. See what you enjoy doing. Some art might be beautiful but less fun to do for you. For example there's some oil painters that I loooove, but let's be real - there's no way I'd ever be patient enough for that level of mastery, probably not even the medium, or in general spending weeks/months on a painting. If you're currently obsessed with Morimura, go for it! You can try and copy the work entirely to get a feel for what it's like, or you can use elements of his style that you enjoy in entirely unrelated images. He seems to mostly do landscapes, but if you don't fancy that you could try a bird pattern or adding a stag to make it your own and still be somewhat in your comfort zone. Or take his style but use someone else's color palette or entirely B&W if it's in colour or vv. I don't know exactly what you're looking for ( technical tips on how to make textures and/or patterns, or more the principles of pattern making like for textiles/packaging, general graphic design principles....?) but I found some stuff by adding in graphic design/illustration in the search term. Or perhaps search for Japanese art/illustration/design to get a different aesthetic. Guess a closer description would be like pulling taffy. 🤔 Either way yes, it's a descriptor. Sometimes it can really help changing the sensations in the body despite doing the same movement. E.g. lie on the floor like it's a spike mat vs melt into the floor. Shame, but if it's not working then it's the right call. Did you pick up any useful tools from her at least?

Oh no, how's your niece doing now? Will it affect her long term or can the disease be managed? I think context matters hugely. When I lived in Finland I had a 30 second walk from the beach. In summer I'd take a thermos with coffee and sit on a deckchair and read and chill and watch birds. A+ way to start the day! In winter.... not so much. "In theory" it should help to even get a tiny bit of light, but clearly he's never lived in a place that sometimes gets 2 sun hours in a month. There is no way the theoretical benefits outweigh the pure misery of getting out in the cold and dark. 😄 Caffeine is terrible for some, and for anyone suffering from e.g. anxiety it's worth cutting out as an experiment. But on a population level I don't believe there are any confirmed health implications. And I think for some people it legit works to boost performance, e.g. before a workout or if you need to focus. I think it can for very select people that lead extremely regular lives. Eat the same things, at the same times, sleep regularly, train the same way, don't have external stressors, probably single, almost certainly male, are able and healthy mentally and physically... Which rules out... pretty much everyone. 😄

Yesterday was handstand day. I could finally feel the fast twitch forearm/finger movements working again! I could balance again! I would've blamed knitting but this weirdness started a few weeks back. I have no idea why, but it's been super annoying. The bad thing was that I was super distracted, thinking about a million things, and on top of that was stressed because I unexpectedly had to rush for dinner at my other grandma's. So my session got cut short and I couldn't get into the handstand groove. But I got to play a bit and hopefully this means I'm past the roadblock and can have fun again! In the evening I played some Shogun, I meant to only play for a bit but got stuck in the "too tired to play well but also getting too frustrated to stop" loop and didn't get around to do anything else. Today will be a bit of a chore day. My grandma's FaceTime on her computer is acting weird so I made a script to hopefully wake it up. It worked, but only one day so I tweaked it this morning and added some better error handling. I also set up another experiment. She struggles with finding her clothes, so I anti-sorted them so that there are both shirts and pants in every pile, randomly interspersed. It felt so very wrong to optimize for maximum randomness rather than any kind of sort order. ? Other things on the todo list: - Weave in ends (maybe even block the hat) - Work on website - Laundry

Smart! It's a little bit visible, but not compared to the mistakes I failed to fix correctly. ? It's also a lot more visible in the beginning before I figured things out and ended up with random very loose stitches. Excellent saying. ? In this case it didn't matter but it's good to know how it can happen for future projects. Thanks!

Hope you feel better this morning! Ok, so what I'm seeing here are lovely muted colors, very graphical work with big simple shapes, embellished with patterns and textures within those shapes, and exaggerated geometric forms mixed with organic imagery. To me they look like posters and book/magazine covers with their flat, simple compositions and color palettes. I already see all of this in your work! Of course feel free to entirely ignore me as I've only seen more scribbly illustrations, but I *think* that to reach the next level the thing to do is honestly just to spend more time on each illustration and make it a bit more polished and deliberate. And maybe practice picking one element and go really bold with it, like the huge geometric antlers, or the big/small contrast in the first image. But I feel like all the components are already there in your art, and I don't think more exercises would necessarily help right now compared to a project. Studying graphic design could be helpful too if you haven't done so already. But I really believe you're capable of creating art like this and maybe the thing that's needed is simply more... confidence. I'm not into yoga so can't help you sorry. All I know is that the asanas are only a small portion of yoga which is a whole philosophical/religious system. Or systems even, it's so old it's been through many permutations. Pandiculation is an awesome movement category, it's what cats do when they stretch when getting up from a nap, or what we do when we yawn! It's stretching your entire body with a lot of tension and quickly releasing and feels really good. We're just trained to not do it because it's "impolite" to yawn or take up space. Basically be a cat.

Sure thing. I just have a huge problem with scientists/doctors/other experts etc giving advice and putting out protocols in fields waaaay outside their domain, pretending it's scientifically backed and using science lingo to back it up and make it sound plausible. In this case the only conclusion a responsible scientist could draw is that it might be worth experimenting with caffeine timing. Far from how these protocols are presented. (How can one even make up a protocol when caffeine affects everyone so very differently and not even talk about dosage?) On a personal level I've also seen this guy being a complete tool gaslighting other people when they've been skeptical towards him instead of engaging in a scientific discussion and it gives me the ick. 100% Some people get so anxious from coffee they can't drink it at all! Now I'm curious whether I have the gene or not... I mean, I wish I could use coffee as an energy boost, but I can happily drink coffee late and go to sleep just fine. I sometimes take breaks from coffee (sometimes to experiment but more often because I keep forgetting to buy a new batch) but have never noticed any difference besides sadness. ? And struggling with hydration when it's colder as I want something warm but can't sub with tea (it often makes me nauseous), while herbal teas get too much and fruit teas too sweet. It's a struggle.

Sorry forgot to reply to this! In this case it was for performance reasons and I wouldn't say it was calm. There's a lot of sensation in a very deep stretch so it was more about staying attentive and not freak out despite discomfort. I think that can be good for mental health too but in a different way. (There's some weird emotional shit happening with stretching.) But I absolutely believe movement can be very effective for mental health maintenance! (I mean besides exercise which is well documented but a different category) Personally I love rolling around on the floor exercises. Juicy pandiculation could be excellent for this. In general exercises that incorporate breathing. Yoga in its original form is more of a spiritual/mental practice and not a physical/relaxation practice, could find something there. Walking meditations are a thing. Walking has additional benefits but for this purpose I think many repetitive movements could fit the bill and be both soothing and connecting. Oh that's a really good point. It feels so long ago, but it really isn't.

Already had the pleasure. ? But I got a lot better at both spotting and fixing my mistakes which is kinda cool! Though I got confused right at the very end and couldn't tell which stitch I dropped and how far and panicked because it was all so fiddly and close together. So I ripped out a few rows until I got my bearings again and dearly hoped I wouldn't end up ripping back the whole thing. Afterwards I discovered there are ways to prevent it, and watched videos on how to fix mistakes, but during the project I of course plowed ahead and improvised. So now my hat has a few holes in it, and a few other mistakes, mostly in the beginning before I figured it out. Oh well. Overall I'm still very happy with it! Which reminds me I completely forgot to ask about the magic loop tricks! I only used it at the very end so it ended up not mattering all that much, but any more rows and the separations would definitely become ugly. I tried it again later and no matter how careful I am it doesn't seem to quite work. ? I have some videos bookmarked on the topic but am very curious what your strategy is. One mistake I sometimes did was accidentally stabbing the yarn and messing it up that way, like the strands would separate or become more fuzzy. I'm guessing that's not fixable? Are different yarns more or less forgiving? Another thing I noticed when looking at people's project on Ravelry is that some hats ended up looking like a condom. I thought maybe it was they were not blocked yet, but my hat doesn't look like that. Which is good because I didn't want a pointy hat, but what's the reason the same pattern looks so different? Is it maybe the stitch length/width ratio...?

That’s super cute! How hard is it to make something like that? On one hand it looks like a lot of basic stitches only with section's twisted over each other, but it also looks like it’d easily end up a hot mess if it’s all not aligned properly.