Here’s a conversation I recently had with someone who wrote to me, and I’m hoping y’all can help. She writes:

I am having such trouble getting a real job. I don’t know why (though I have my guesses, which we’ll get to in a moment), but I really am.

I am 17-3/4, and I will be turning 18 in December. Most people I know in my area and age bracket are working at least one job. I have tried and tried and tried to get a job. There was one point where I almost got one, but the person in charge of my case quit, so I was dropped.

Is it because I’m a girl? Is it because of my stutter? I have a slight unibrow – should I tweeze it? I have Asperger’s – do they know that, and are they not hiring me because of that? Should I get some sort of facial surgery or other medical procedure to make me look “more professional”? Is it my poor math skills? My loud, sometimes flat-ish voice? I’m not blonde – does that matter? Do they know about my slight mental health issues? Is it something to do with my unusual parents? Is it my weak back? My weak arms? My weak hands? My big feet? Is it my height? I mean, I’m pretty tall. Do I seem too indecisive? Too impulsive? Is it the fact that I have to wear glasses? Am I not wearing the right colors to interviews somehow? Am I too extroverted? Does my not having a car matter? Should I be wearing more makeup? Less makeup? Do they know I have to take meds, and is that why? Is it my teeth? My dark circles? My slightly pointed ears? Do I need different earrings? Different skirt? Bring a pen? Am I over-thinking this?

YOU GOTTA HELP ME!!!

I wrote back and said: “It’s probably not any of that, and you definitely shouldn’t feel like you need any kind of plastic surgery to look professional! As long as you look reasonably neat and groomed, your appearance shouldn’t be playing much of a role in hiring decisions.

Any chance it’s something about your manner in person? It can be hard for everyone to come across as professional when you’re just starting your career, and Asperger’s can sometimes make it harder. If that’s what’s happening, it’s absolutely something that you can overcome with some pointers. (I could be off-base about it; it’s just something that’s not uncommon with Asperger’s in the beginning of job searching.) If you think that might be what’s happening, I’d be glad to do a post soliciting advice from readers on the autism spectrum; I know I have a bunch, and people tend to like to be helpful with this stuff if they can. Let me know if that seems like it might be helpful, and I’ll do it!”

She gave me the go-ahead:  Please do an Aspie-targeted post for advice. You’re exactly correct that it definitely does make social-type things harder when you’re an Aspie. I could use some help from some more successful Aspies in learning to be a successful person with Asperger’s. Thanks in advance.

So, readers on the autism spectrum, do you have advice for job searching that might help in this context? (Others are welcome to chime in too, but I’m especially interested to hear from people with firsthand experience.)

job-searching advice for a teenager on the autism spectrum was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

Contemporary culture has a way of making everything seem daunting, even something as simple as meditation. This 2-minute video presents a very straightforward way to start meditating: sit up straight and concentrate on your breathing for five minutes.

Your brain’s gonna go nuts, and that’s fine. The whole game is to notice when you’ve gotten lost, and then to start over. And then start over again. And again. And again. Every time you do that, it’s like a bicep curl for your brain. […] Meditation is unlike anything you do in the rest of your life. Failure is actually success.

The video is narrated by Dan Harris, the author of 10% Happier, which has a subtitle many of you might be able to relate to: “How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works”.

Brilliantly shot, compelling, intriguing, entertaining and (most crucially) with a satisfying payoff.

Well done, all concerned.

For the Guardian

(via Lourdes on Twitter: “Omfg I’m at Home Depot and someone put pornhub on this refrigerator https://t.co/BJgIOORZqC”)

More Wizard of Oz.

by Extra Fabulous Comics

pigeonbits:

Here’s the full 24 hour comic I drew yesterday, called “The Fish Wife”.  Thank you to everybody who followed along on twitter and cheered me on

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Owl facts. (via dave)

This rolling Panda made me smile. Happy Friday everyone!

Rosetta's Farewell

“When you’re young, and things come super easily to you, and you have success right out of the gate, you’re liable to think that’s how it actually works. You start to think you don’t need to be fully prepared or committed to have these things meet you.”

—actress Sarah Paulson on success later in life, GQ, October 2016

continued at twitter.com/elementsrunk

VAQUERA BTS SS17Photography by Dillon Sachs

Credits

nuevayor:

reblog to support Bisexual Birb

Driver: J.R.R. Tolkien
“Driver meandered so much that I stopped the trip halfway through.”

Driver: Harper Lee
“I don’t know if it is a violation of Uber’s rules, but she had a friend sitting shotgun with whom she switched places right before the ride begun.”

Driver: Chuck Klosterman
“Constantly fiddled with the radio.”

Driver: Jack Kerouac
“Took the scenic route.”

Driver: George RR Martin
“Struck and killed a pedestrian!”

Driver: Robert Frost
“Refused to go my route, said he knew a lesser trafficked road.”

Driver: Herman Melville
“Kept pointing things out for no reason. Sloooowwwwww driver.”

Driver: Charles Bukowski
“I think driver was drunk!”

Driver: Hunter S. Thompson
“I think the driver was more than drunk.”

Driver: H.L. Mencken
“Didn’t obey traffic laws.”

Driver: Ayn Rand
“Waited until Surge to pick me up.”

Driver: Dan Brown
“Kept hitting plotholes.”

realcleverscience:

theverge:

This is the first ever ultrasound of a pregnant tiger shark.

“Congratulations! It’s sharks!”

Imagine being pregnant and someone pranking you by showing you this ultrasound of “your child”, lol

also, this is too rad

sharks to meet you

embiggenedcromulence:

Hillary 2016

Remember to watch the debate tonight with the burning fury of a Paris from “Gilmore Girls” denied.

In the midst of this US election season, I bring you the first and last time that Canada’s Rhinoceros Party was allowed to appear on national public broadcasting. Hat tip.

From Wikipedia, various elements of their platform over the years:

• Providing higher education by building taller schools
• Instituting English, French and illiteracy as Canada’s three official languages
• The Queen of Canada would be seated in Buckingham, Quebec.
• Rather than awarding money as prizes in the lottery, the winners would be appointed to the Canadian Senate.
• Making the Trans-Canada Highway one way only.
• Changing Canada’s currency to bubble gum, so it could be inflated or deflated at will.
• Amending Canada’s Freedom of Information Act: “Nothing is free anymore; Canadians should have to pay for their information”.
• Adopting the British system of driving on the left; this was to be gradually phased in over five years with large trucks and tractors first, then buses, eventually including small cars, and bicycles and wheelchairs last.

The post One more reason to be wistful of politics north of the border appeared first on Chris Blattman.

The first of its kind, this Japanese museum focuses exclusively on showcasing architectural models through rotating displays of miniatures, treating these crafted works as their own subset of art. The Archi-Depot in Tokyo is a huge warehouse space with 17-foot ceilings and a dazzling array of models from everyday architects as well as famous designers alike.

Each model comes with a QR code that provides information about the work, including blueprints, renderings and photographs of finished works as well as details about the architects.

Special lighting and climate control features help preserve and protect the models, just like art in an ordinary museum. The institution is as much oriented toward maintaining these works as it is toward displaying them.

These miniature buildings can be fantastic in their details and visual expression, but are often only seen behind closed doors in architecture firms. This museum takes these carefully-constructed works and puts them on public display.

Featured architects include Kengo Kuma, the designer selected to create the 2020 World Olympics Stadium, as well as Shigeru Ban, famous for his work with paper and cardboard.

Not all of the models represent buildings either under construction or already completed. Some feature conceptual pieces or draft works that for financial or other reasons will never be built. Shelf space is also rented out to architectural firms needing a place to store their models (and, of course, wanting to advertise their skills to a broader audience).

“Most architects have a store room full of lovely models that no one gets to see. But the situation is worse in offices in Japan, where space is really at a premium,” explained Klein Dytham co-founder Mark Dytham. “So this initiative is really brilliant – it’s a win-win for the architect and Archi-Depot. You rent a set of tall shelves, display your models on the lower shelves, and store the boxes and cases on the upper shelves. Hey presto, an instant architectural model museum with works by most of Japan’s leading architects.”

The recent launch of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary (AND) gave me a chance to indulge in my long-time hobby of looking up the swear words. I’m looking forward to sharing some of my favourite home-grown colourful language in a future post, but I want to start with an entry that gives me the kind of pride that others expended on the Olympic Games last month.

The entry for fuckwit (p. 647) includes the note:

Used elsewhere but recorded earliest in Australia

That’s right. Australia is the home of the fuckwit. The earliest citation in the AND and the Oxford English Dictionary is from Alex Buzo’s 1970 play The Front Room Boys. The earliest non-Australian citation in the OED is from a 1992 article in Making Music magazine from America.

The second edition of the AND expands the citations for fuckwit, makes a clearer distinction between nominal and adjectival use, and (most importantly) adds an earlier citation for fuckwitted. Here are the entries, along with the earliest few citations:

A. N. A fool, an idiot

1969 A. Buzo Front Room Boys (1970) 89 ooh, temper! Well, ta-ta for now, fuckwit.
1970 D. Williamson Coming of Stork (1974) 5 ‘I’m a trainee marketing executive…’ ‘You’re a fuckwit’
1977 Southerly i. 48 I object to trendy words like fuckwit and avoid it even in Scrabble.
1980 F. Moorhouse Days of Wine & Rage 79 The present government consists of the finest set of fuckwits seen since federation.

B. adj. Stupid, foolish, idiotic

1979 Meanjin 464 It sounded like a load of fuckwit shit to me
1993 Picture (Sydney) 27 Oct. 25/5 An interesting Seppo has taught his pet… to roll over, play dead, walk up a ramp, and stand on a  barrel. Big fucking deal, you say, any fuckwit dog can do that.

Derivative: fuckwitted adj.

1972 J. Hibberd Stretch of Imagination (1973) 20 you two-timing, fuck-witted mongrel of a slut.
1973 D. Williamson Coming of Stork (1974) 152 That fuckwitted agent of yours is really driving me right off my brain.

That Seppo, in case you’re wondering, is a glorious example of Australian rhyming slang; Seppo > Septic Tank > Yank.

Another change that the AND have made to the entry is to label fuckwit as derogatory. These labels were omitted from the first edition based on the very Australian logic that:

There is a danger that using labels to indicate register can be overinterpretative and over-restrictive. This seems particularly true of Australian English, which allows easy movement between formal and informal usage. It should be clear from the citations if a word belongs mainly in colloquial use or to the slang of a particular group, and equally clear if it is for some reason taboo in some contexts. Labels like coarse, colloq., derog., slang, and vulgar, which tend unnecessarily to categorize, have therefore been omitted.

The labels Offens. and Derog. have been added to entries in the second edition of the AND in case you’re too much of a fuckwit to tell if something is offensive.

[Update: If you were wondering why Coming of Stork is given the date 1970 in the noun entry and 1973 in the derivative entry (and I know you were), I got in touch with the AND team to ask. The derivative entry is actually from the play What if I Died Tomorrow (performed 1973); these two plays were bundled in the same book, with different performance dates, which is where the confusion of the texts comes from.]

It has come to my attention that many laypeople, even Language Log readers, are using incorrect plurals for flower names. "Geraniums" indeed! "Crocuses", for heaven's sake! Please get these right. There follows a list of 30 count nouns naming flowers, together with their approved grammatically correct plurals. Don't use incorrect plurals any more. Shape up.

Oh, one other thing before you go: I'm kidding (though I bet until you were a few seconds into the list you thought I wasn't)! Nearly all the above are ridiculous. In certain cases it is completely clear that I simply made stuff up. (People nearly always get away with making stuff up about language; they assume no one will call them on what they say, and they are very largely right.)

Most flower names take ordinary regular native English plurals (camellias, crocuses, forget-me-nots, geraniums, snapdragons, …). For a few, the Latin plural may be common (as with gladioli, for example). A very few may be on the anglicization cusp, showing variation between ordinary regular plurals and irregular classical ones; non-flower nouns in this state include focus (focuses or foci), index (indexes or indices), etc. And some names of plants with small flowers (like maybe cosmos) may act like mass nouns rather than taking plural forms (We planted a whole lot of cosmos over there).

Don't be bullied by prescriptivist or purist nitwits who imagine that status can be achieved by learning the formation of Latin and Greek plurals, and that you're a bad person if you say The data is complex rather than The data are complex. (Once upon a time — say 50 years ago — data was widely regarded as simply the irregular plural of the Latin word datum "that which is given", so it took plural agreement; but now it is an English non-count noun meaning something like "information that could be subjected to scientific analysis" and generally takes singular agreement.)

Look at ordinary practice in order to decide what is probably correct English, and accept that there may be variation within Standard English morphology. (But do get phenomena right: it's the Greek plural of phenomenon. One must have some standards. You will not be invited to the right literary lunches if you say *It was a strange phenomena.)

whynotbothco:

Happy Bisexual Visibility Day!

Let’s just hold up for one second– what if I told you, and meant in sincerity, that beauty is worthless?
No apology, no justification that everyone is beautiful in their way and everyone just needs to show their inner beauty to the world like blah blah blah. Just a simple premise from which to operate for the sake of argument: beauty is worthless. Say it’s like whistling, maybe. Nice, but also who cares.
If you spent even one day operating under this principle, what would change? What about yourself would you value and be valued by others? When you looked at those other women, assuming beauty = null, what would you value about them?
There are valuable things about you that have absolutely nothing to do with how you look, and with every single one of them as well. Honesty, decency, tenacity. Maybe a gift for poetry. Maybe the ability to identify what mushrooms are poisonous. Who knows! But if we focus all our energies on what every woman looks like, we may never get the chance to appreciate their limericks or benefit from knowing which mushroom is a death cap. (aaaa, it’s that one!!!)
As I’m sure you’re aware through your readings here and elsewhere, through forced femininity, women are conditioned to believe that they must be beautiful or else they have no value; that the value of other women must be a function of their attractiveness; that love is only for attractive people. That’s why there is so much emphasis, even among progressive circles, in emphasizing that “every girl is beautiful”– when it’s used as a synonym for “having value,” it gets pushed as mandatory.
None of these things are true. You can literally be the ugliest person alive and still be a whole and good and valuable person. Even if you had a tooth growing out of your forehead you would still be a whole and worthwhile person. [link]

Georgian artist Tezi Gabunia wants to trigger a dialogue about hyper realistic issues in art. His modus operandi is falsification. In his work “put your head into gallery”, Gabunia wanted to bring the galleries and the art to the people, and not the other way around. He created miniature models of famous museums like the Louvre (Rubens) and art galleries like Gagosian (Liechtenstein). People can put their head into the models, see the exhibition, take a picture and become an exhibit themselves.