So, once upon a time I said, “If you can’t tell Captain America what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it” and it inspired a poem by Catt Kingsgrave (aka theactualcluegirl) which eventually led to this pre-release rough-draft single, The Ballad Of Captain America’s Disapproving Face (also available for listening here on SoundCloud).
I guarantee you will never laugh this hard at any other song that opens with a riff on the Star Spangled Banner. Also there is, if I’m not mistaken, a kazoo cover of Star Spangled Man involved.
Anyhow, Murder Ballads is working on an album, and if you like the song, consider throwing a few bucks their way to help get their album made.
(The accompanying image up there is by the astonishing Frogbillgo, but is not associated officially with the album.)
This has come across my dash a number of times and I’ve never listened because I’m usually doing my Tumbling in circumstances when it would be inconvenient (either because everyone else is asleep or because I’m doing it in 15-second increments while also cooking and ensuring the kid doesn’t jump out the window), but I finally made the time and I do not regret it. Listen to this. Listen to it again. Giggle. I did.
This is *always* worth a reblog. Especially with omg-face pics attached. Yes, that *is* a kazoo cover of “Star-Spangled Man with a Plan” during the bridge.
Maybe it’s my general apathy towards campy music, or maybe it’s the immunity to Disapproving Looks that I’ve developed over the years, but I’m not really feeling convicted or whatever.
[no content in this post so that reblogs of this will be second-level reblogs]
I don’t remember it being used in my school.
It’s been long enough that I don’t remember the circumstances, but it was definitely not at school because I didn’t go to school. (I don’t *think* it was a schoolbook.)
It might have been from my parents: my dad’s left-handed, so *some* lesson on handedness would be bound to come up at some point†. Or media. Or maybe Girl Scouts (which is also kind of parents, since my mom led my troop). Or a combination of the above.
(When I dig through my brain, I get strongest associations with Girl Scouts, but that might just be from me *thinking* about previous right-handed-privilege stuff *during* Girl Scouts because of crafts using right-handed scissors.)
—
†And I suppose might not come up much in an all-right-handed family, so that alone would go a fair way towards making it not a Relatable Childhood Experience.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #Girl Scouts #my childhood #(I’m…I guess I could put it as ”right-handed but left-armed”) #(my right hand is better at finesse and my left is better at brute strength) #((I use my left hand to open jars)) #(apparently Mom’s dominant hand is also her stronger and she was surprised to learn mine were different) #(I wonder how common a difference is)
I wrote a while ago about my baby roommate and novelty. The idea is that people find things interesting and exciting when they have the right amount of novelty. Things that are too predictable, like a children’s book you’ve read to a demanding kid ten thousand times, are boring. Things that aren’t predictable enough, like a long novel in a language you don’t speak, are also boring. It’s the process of forming expectations that are often right but sometimes surprised which makes something fun. So for a baby, repetitive play is fun, because every time the duck lands in the bathtub is slightly surprising; for an adult, those variants all make perfect sense and aren’t a source of thrilling novelty anymore.
But I think adults also vary tremendously in how much novelty they enjoy. There are people who reread books all the time, and people who never reread books, both of whom tend to regard each other with total incomprehension. There are people who like their nice simple job doing mostly the same thing every day, and there are people who’d die of boredom. And people are often attuned to different kinds of novelty – for me, ‘sewing dresses’ sounds like doing the same boring thing over and over again, but I bet anyone who actually does it would tell me that different fabrics and threads and stitches and fittings and other constraints make every project different.
I think we tend to talk about jobs as if everyone wants high novelty (art! research! acting! travel!) and some are forced to settle for the mindless drudgery of accounting or marketing or human resources or middle management. But that’s not how it works. Things that are an exciting and satisfying amount of novelty for some people are above the satisfying threshold for other people, and they’re just stressful and demoralizing. Things that would have some people grinding their teeth with tedium have lots of hidden novelty of just the right type for some other people.
But we don’t give kids a lot of opportunity to discover if they’re someone who would find accounting delightfully rewarding minute-to-minute. We don’t even tell them that anyone finds accounting delightfully rewarding. There isn’t really a chance, ever, to try forty things and figure out which one of them hits the right spot in your brain. Which is too bad, because I suspect that getting this right (and noticing when your job has ceased to offer it) is a major contributor to day-to-day happiness.
Why do people think accounting is boring? Learning it is boring. Doing the day to day job… you don’t just do the same thing all day. Almost everyday it’s a juggling of what’s normal important right now and in 30 mins or an hour that’s going to change and you have to shift gears because something else has come up. The part I like the most but find the least rewarding is reconciliation projects for accounts that are years old. I can spend hours digging through tons of information to figure out what caused the problem and when it’s resolved, I solved the puzzle! But all I have to show for all that work is a couple of sentences or *maybe* a spreadsheet showing what I found. But I almost never get to really dig in on those problems because there’s always so much to do that has to be done Now.
Maybe it’s more boring in companies that have sufficient staffing.
I have really been feeling that lack-of-opportunity-to-figure-out-if-you-would-like-doing-accounting lately. *Specifically* regarding accounting.
There’s a draft I never got around to posting that talks about how I’ve been considering the possibility of changing my major from computer science to accounting, but that it’s hard to tell whether that’s a good idea because I have so little sense of what accountants actually *do*. (I interact with enough programmers that at least I have some sense of what *they* do.)
I enjoy making my family’s financial spreadsheets and gathering and crunching the numbers on what possible frugality-efforts would get us, but I don’t know how suggestive that really is.
@gnomer-denois (it won’t actually let me ping you, but since I’m reblogging directly from you you’ll probably still see it), if I may ask, what made you decide to become an accountant?
Um, well. My degree in floral design (BS in Horticulture) wasn’t proving very useful since I didn’t have the equity to open my own store. Then I realized that, despite my rebelling against my math teacher mother, I do actually like math. I was on the fence between engineering and accounting but I prefer the more basic number manipulation to the higher level math.
My grandfather was an accountant after he retired from the Air Force, but a bunch of uncles and cousins are engineers, so that part could have gone either way. I had already taken an intro to accounting course during my first BS, and while it was confusing at first, once it clicked it made sense and I knew I could do it.
Also, at the time I started my BS in Accounting, most job listings for accountants required a BS and most for engineers required an MS. Since then there were stricter requirements put in place to sit for the CPA exam that mean I’ve needed to go on to a Masters of Accountancy, though I suspect if it was worked right that might not be necessary for everyone, depending on state/country. Recently I’ve been considering going on for my PhD and becoming a professor.
It sounds like you enjoy doing cost-benefit analysis and some other things that might lend well towards managerial accounting. Www.imanet.org has information about that if you are interested.
Thank you! That sounds promising.
Traditionally I take two consecutive days off from school-related tasks after finishing a semester, but I will look through that website after I’ve had a chance to recover.
I have one intro-level elective slot left in my computer-science major, so I can take intro to accounting without any sunk costs (the credits will still count towards my degree even if I continue with CS). I’m planning to do that next semester, and we’ll see how it goes.
I wrote a while ago about my baby roommate and novelty. The idea is that people find things interesting and exciting when they have the right amount of novelty. Things that are too predictable, like a children’s book you’ve read to a demanding kid ten thousand times, are boring. Things that aren’t predictable enough, like a long novel in a language you don’t speak, are also boring. It’s the process of forming expectations that are often right but sometimes surprised which makes something fun. So for a baby, repetitive play is fun, because every time the duck lands in the bathtub is slightly surprising; for an adult, those variants all make perfect sense and aren’t a source of thrilling novelty anymore.
But I think adults also vary tremendously in how much novelty they enjoy. There are people who reread books all the time, and people who never reread books, both of whom tend to regard each other with total incomprehension. There are people who like their nice simple job doing mostly the same thing every day, and there are people who’d die of boredom. And people are often attuned to different kinds of novelty – for me, ‘sewing dresses’ sounds like doing the same boring thing over and over again, but I bet anyone who actually does it would tell me that different fabrics and threads and stitches and fittings and other constraints make every project different.
I think we tend to talk about jobs as if everyone wants high novelty (art! research! acting! travel!) and some are forced to settle for the mindless drudgery of accounting or marketing or human resources or middle management. But that’s not how it works. Things that are an exciting and satisfying amount of novelty for some people are above the satisfying threshold for other people, and they’re just stressful and demoralizing. Things that would have some people grinding their teeth with tedium have lots of hidden novelty of just the right type for some other people.
But we don’t give kids a lot of opportunity to discover if they’re someone who would find accounting delightfully rewarding minute-to-minute. We don’t even tell them that anyone finds accounting delightfully rewarding. There isn’t really a chance, ever, to try forty things and figure out which one of them hits the right spot in your brain. Which is too bad, because I suspect that getting this right (and noticing when your job has ceased to offer it) is a major contributor to day-to-day happiness.
Why do people think accounting is boring? Learning it is boring. Doing the day to day job… you don’t just do the same thing all day. Almost everyday it’s a juggling of what’s normal important right now and in 30 mins or an hour that’s going to change and you have to shift gears because something else has come up. The part I like the most but find the least rewarding is reconciliation projects for accounts that are years old. I can spend hours digging through tons of information to figure out what caused the problem and when it’s resolved, I solved the puzzle! But all I have to show for all that work is a couple of sentences or *maybe* a spreadsheet showing what I found. But I almost never get to really dig in on those problems because there’s always so much to do that has to be done Now.
Maybe it’s more boring in companies that have sufficient staffing.
I have really been feeling that lack-of-opportunity-to-figure-out-if-you-would-like-doing-accounting lately. *Specifically* regarding accounting.
There’s a draft I never got around to posting that talks about how I’ve been considering the possibility of changing my major from computer science to accounting, but that it’s hard to tell whether that’s a good idea because I have so little sense of what accountants actually *do*. (I interact with enough programmers that at least I have some sense of what *they* do.)
I enjoy making my family’s financial spreadsheets and gathering and crunching the numbers on what possible frugality-efforts would get us, but I don’t know how suggestive that really is.
@gnomer-denois (it won’t actually let me ping you, but since I’m reblogging directly from you you’ll probably still see it), if I may ask, what made you decide to become an accountant?
Tags:
#adventures in University Land #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #today was the last day of my current semester #now that there’s no short-term schoolwork for a little while I was thinking of doing some digging #trying to learn about what being an accountant is like #but I will happily take stumbling across some information #(only one more month until I can make the annual report for 2017!) #(honestly looking forward to it)
I am getting first-aid certified because I have an anxiety disorder and here is an IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION:
if you have a medical emergency and you don’t know what to do, CALL 911. The dispatcher will tell you what to do. They do not just send you paramedics. This is probably the single most important thing to remember about medical emergencies.
If you’re in England, and the idea of calling 999 is too scary because you’re not sure whether it’s serious enough, you can also call 111 for non-emergency help. They’ll ask you a bunch of questions, and if it turns out that it is an emergency will (I’ve been told) call an ambulance for you, and if it’s not that serious give you some advice and call back in a few hours to check up on you.
Today, I am thankful that my workplace does not play Christmas music.
Tags:
#Top 40 is vastly preferable #(I mean there’s other things I’m thankful for too) #(but this is one of the less obvious ones) #we aren’t actually observing Thanksgiving today because from 1 PM to midnight at least one family member is at work at any given time #we will have our feast on Saturday instead #(note: from what I can gather regarding previous years it really is that they *don’t* play it and not that they start playing it later) #(but I suppose it could do with some wood-knocking anyway) #Christmas #in which Brin has a job #oh look an original post #music #Thanksgiving #this kind of sounds like a joke but it is also completely truthful
#Amenta RP #Amenta #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #nsfw text #injury cw #death mention #suicide cw? #I feel like this probably deserves some additional warning tag but I’m not sure what #(they do say @industrialbruise is his own content warning but probably a lot of my followers would not know that) #high context jokes
People who don’t want to read The Martian in case the science is too complicated should be informed that it contains the lines “The best way to store the ingredients of water is to make them be water”, “It is of course dangerous to set off an explosive device on a spacecraft”, and “If I cut a hole in the wall of the hab, the air won’t stay inside any more”.
I love this fucking book
“I’ve said the words kilowatt-hours-per-sol so many times they’ve lost all meaning so I’m going to call them pirate-ninjas.
“So I need to generate nine hundred pirate-ninjas…”
there’s an entire chapter dedicated to him wondering how the cubs are doing while he’s stuck on mars, dying
I like the part where the guys on Earth are like “He thinks we all gave up on him, and that he’s completely alone. I wonder what he’s thinking about right now.”
And he’s like “How come Aquaman can control whales?”
Tags:
#The Martian #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #huh maybe I should read this book #(though my to-read list is way too long as it is so I don’t seriously expect to get around to it) #death mention #(which is related to the previous post actually) #(I tag very strictly and consistently for death) #(because I determine whether to tag for it using my seven-year-old self as a model) #(and seven-year-old me was extremely sensitive to even the slightest mention of death)
Brinens and Things 